Today I hit the Wednesday Farmers Market in Santa Cruz, with the full on sun, the clown and the balloons, the young guy getting his face painted. Early strawberries were like gold, snapped up almost as fast as they were brought out; Windmill Farms was sold out, Dirty Girl's boxes were stacked and empty, and still I found a half case of Swanton Road berries that I'm pretty sure the Royal Wedding wishes they had.
For some reason the market today was a little out of time for me, as if I'd come down from the mountain to a date both far in the past and a little in the future, when we'd figured out how to survive the hangover of the Green Revolution, oil and fertilizer and exhausted soils and all. I saw a couple friends and had that check-in conversation that you can't really have on Facebook. My friend Stiny was there and we were talking about the usual when he brought up how long we've known each other - since 1980?? - and I remember meeting him for the first time and thinking how like a bro he was to me: both skinny, long haired, rocking the revolutionary beret and irony, both. At one point a little girl skipped past and we both stopped talking to watch her, with her shock of red hair and three quarter length kid pants like a psychedelic Annie.
It was that kind of market.
I talked to people in line (the woman teaching at Stanford from Austria, the guy who wondered whether the roti chicken would leak through the leak-"resistant" waxed bag), talked to vendors (the flower people from Thomas Farms about lilies, the woman from Blue Heron about ranunculus, the guys at Pinnacle about snap peas). At the end I had the half case of berries, big bags of flowers, a half chicken and savory potatoes, a big veggie crepe, the peas and fattie asparagus for the grill.
Perfect. And I walked past Route One farms surprised to find no Romaine lettuce, and then remembered that after Fukushima's radiation plume, the word is don't buy broad leaf plants for a while. And I looked at where the lettuce usually is, that gap in the market, and looked up, and remembered being up in the mountains.
The snow, falling so late in the winter, fresh and white and infinite, falling through the chill sky toward the extended tongue, remembering too late the injunction against broad leaf plants and rainwater, the ghost of radiation a shimmer around each snowflake.
Ah, Steiny. i remember when the three of us were the urban toothpick collective. i bet he is still using that ghetto blaster i gave him 20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteha! it was more like 27 years ago- i remember you were aghast that i had no device with which to play music.
ReplyDeleteyeah- i still have it somewhere but the cassettes all turned to dust.
thanks pax