fresh
Last fall, our Department Coordinator brought in some tiny, crisp, twangy apples and gave one to me. The taste was pure Fall, in all senses of the word — it was both the season wrapped up in a blush-skinned sphere and reason enough to leave the Garden. She had bought several pounds of them at the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, and when my eyes lit up she drew me a map of how to get there.
Of course, I proceeded to not go because I was spending my weekend mornings locked in my study, and then the market shut down for the winter. When it opened back up in April, I was busy relearning to walk. I thought of going fairly often, but doubted my ability to walk the entire 150-year-old market, which is paved with cobblestones.
Yesterday, I got up, took a shower, and went downtown. It was everything I hoped it would be: people and music and dogs and, of course, produce. I walked it one full round and then another half, and the cobbles gently loosened the ankle (although it ached later). I bought peonies, local bacon, tallow-tree honey, rhubarb, sugar peas, baby onions, baby tomatoes, baby cucumbers, and dill. It’s only lately that I’ve been using fresh dill, and it turns out to be one of my intense scent memories. One whiff and I’m short once more, standing in my grandmother’s garden next to dill that’s taller than I am. It and I are baking in the sun, and I'm surrounded by the smell of hot dill. Later, the grownups cut it and packed it into jar after jar of pickles to store in the porch cabinets. Now, going on 30, I’ve chopped it fine for dilled potato salad, and left the rest (still with its roots) in a jar on the counter. It’s a dill bouquet.
I also bought eggs that came out of chickens, as opposed to the supermarket eggs that I’m pretty sure come out of an egg-shaped mold. My grandma’s next door neighbor kept chickens when I was growing up. I tried to kidnap the chicks, and the Bonds sent eggs over constantly. They looked pretty much like these, and we ate boiled eggs and toast for breakfast most mornings when I stayed there. (When I wasn’t insisting on eating leftover Captain D’s, which nobody else ate.) It was a well-managed, small, free-range flock; there were probably never more than 20 or 30 birds running around. Their eggs had deep orange yolks, far more gold than the pale yellow of most eggs I buy now. Eggs worth going downtown for.
I’m not sure why, but I feel more alive with food like this in the house. Everything came from Minnesota or Wisconsin, and actual animals and dirt are involved. I saw the people who raised and made and grew it. I put my money in their hands, and they gave me this wonderful stuff. (And all of it for $27!) It’s a small miracle to someone like me, who has spent her life shopping in supermarkets. I rarely went to the Little Rock Farmer’s Market, with the humidity and tedious parking and crowds. I should have. And I will keep going here.
Comments
Those are beautiful.
Will you keep them beside your bedside table so you can see them in the morning? Or on a table nearby where you breakfast so you can appreciate them there? Or on a corner of a work table where you look up in the occasional drift from writing to find inspiration in the form of horticulture?
They are beautiful and I hope that you enjoy them.
Posted by: Michelle | June 12, 2005 11:09 PM