The End is Near---no, not that one! Markets and Madness

The farmers market in the fall is a different place than the beehive of activity it is in the summer. It wasn’t just the sparseness of shoppers and fewer tents lined up against a backdrop of fall colors along the river. It was also the sight of vendors wearing knit hats and gloves as they sipped on steaming cups of coffee. The sweet aroma of the kettle corn maker, the baker and the flower vendors still filled the air but in place of vendors selling cucumbers, corn, peppers and tomatoes were tables overflowing with squash, pumpkins, root vegetables and apples. Instead of tender plants for gardeners were bulbs and potted mums. I bought cinnamon bread, heads of broccoli and cauliflower plus carrots and squash to hold over the winter (wrapped in newspaper and stored in the garage). I was going to buy a bouquet of mixed cut flowers but I fell in love with huge stems of cut ornamental kale and I bought three in dark lilac fading to soft mauve. 

One more week and the market will close and I’ll go back for potatoes and maybe breakfast at a nearby place that was a favorite of my husband’s. It’s a terrible place to get into with a wheelchair but the market people who frequent the place always went out of their way to help with the double doors. Don never seemed to notice how many machines dispensing gumballs and newspapers people had to move out of his path. All he ever saw was their friendly, smiling faces. It was a gift not to notice the inconveniences of going to that old, tourist town restaurant because that sort of thing tends to make a lot of disabled people stay at home. I suppose it was because Don, the master storyteller in his pre-stroke days, was used to being the center of attention. I, on the other hand preferred then, as I do now, to be like a camera drone recording life from a safe distance. And from my bird’s eye view I’m happy to report that most people show kindness when it counts. Motivational speaker and author Steve Marabholi wrote: “It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime.” Boy isn’t that a fact! Look how long I’m remembering the time and place of warm smiles and small gestures of kindness. 

On the opposite end of kindness is the meanness that has become part of our current election season and aren’t we all glad that, like the farmers market, the end is near. Am I alone is sensing a shift in hostilities? People have made up their minds and in some cases have already voted. Soon, Facebook will no longer challenge my willpower and self-control to not get involved in nasty political exchanges with some in-law family members. One woman in particular has spent months posting extremist, hate-filled and offensive stuff but this morning I thought someone must have hacked her account when she posted a meme that read: “The less you respond to negativity the more peaceful your life will become.” I read that over several times and spent a full two minutes trying to decide if I should hit the key that would publish a response I had typed that read, “The less a person posts negativity the more peaceful everyone’s life will become.” In the end, I back-spaced my catty words off the reply box and left. Many people unfriend someone who bugs their sanity and temps them to leave civility behind but that’s not my style. I like to have my finger on the pulse of what family thinks…recording it like that camera drone overhead. But I will admit I no longer feel an ounce of warmth toward this woman…and all because of this election!

“Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Those words roll around inside my head, telling me I should have taken a stand on Facebook starting months ago, but my silence was insurance against getting turned down if I should ever need a ride to a med station or the hospital. I live close to In-Law Land so my silence was self-servicing and I’m not proud of that. If I do give in before the election and post a Facebook response to the “great, white hopes” of a Trump presidency or an armed resistance if he doesn’t win, I hope it will be something polite like the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The fate of America cannot depend on any one man. The greatness of America is grounded in principles and not on any single personality.” Can you tell I just got a new book titled, The Best Liberal Quotes Ever? ©

The photo at the top is of the fall cornucopia on my dining room table. I know they’re hopeless out of fashion but I’ve been making them since the early ‘70s and I still love them. The scarecrow below is on my front door and the four foot wooden trencher is along my breakfast bar. (If there isn’t a holiday around, the trencher gets filled with stones and fossils.) And last but not least are my farmers market cut kale. 

 

Fashions, Hormones and Farmers Markets

I don’t know why it took me until the middle of July before going to the farmers market for the first time this summer. Where else can you pay $7.00 for four Lemon Dream cookies and feel good about it because all the proceeds go to charity or see people with their dogs impatiently waiting for them to pay for homemade beef jerky sticks or watch kettle corn being made next to a vendor selling goats cheese? I bought more cut flowers than healthy eatable’s but that’s okay. I gave up on having a Twiggy-like figure the first time I had the stomach flu and if you understand that statement, you probably came-of-age in the 1960s. Thunder-thighs that I was back in those days (and still am) I both hated and loved Twiggy for the impossible standard of anorexia induced beauty she set. Who didn’t want to look that skinning in a polyester knit A-line dress? Raise your hand. I really want to know.

On the way home from the farmers market the prime country radio station was playing a song by Billy Currington and I was smitten with his ability to tell a sweet, boy-meets-girl story. If I had a pinky’s worth of musical talent I’d try my hand at writing songs but I spent so many years trying to learn how to flesh out my written thoughts that it would be difficult to condense my words down to the just the important ones to carry a story along. But mostly songs like Billy’s Good Directions have me reminiscing about what it felt like to experience sexual attraction like I did back in my husband hunting days when I wore A-line dresses and go-go boots. I can’t even remember the last time that actually happened. Even George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey have lost their power to make my heart skip a beat. Raise your hand if they still have power over your hormones. I really want to know.

“I was sittin' there sellin' turnips on a flatbed truck

Crunchin' on a pork rind when she pulled up

She had to be thinkin' this is where rednecks come from

She had Hollywood written on her license plate

She was lost and lookin' for the interstate

Needin' directions, and I was the man for the job.

“I told her way up yonder past the caution light

There's a little country store with an old Coke sign

You gotta stop in and ask Miss Bell for some of her sweet tea

Then a left will take you to the interstate

But a right will bring you right back here to me.”

It’s not hard to guess that after a few more verses Billy Currington wrote the girl “of his dreams” coming back to the flatbed truck with the last line of the song saying, “Thank God for good directions...and turnip greens.”

Recently I went to a fashion trunk show. Yes, you read that right. Me, the woman who’d gladly live in a bathrobe all day long if society wouldn’t judge that as an indicator of poor mental health or senior depression. But it’s true; I’ve gone from the A-line dresses of my best fashion plate years to a look that says if-my-breasts-and-tushie-are-covered-up-good-enough. I didn’t actually sign up for this trunk show. An acquaintance was offering the ticket to anyone who was available on short notice. I spoke up with no more forethought than I had the afternoon open.

I’d been to a couple of trunk shows in my past but this one was different. It was a like Tupperware party for what they called ‘investment pieces’---blouses, jackets and gauze vests one supposedly can wear for decades. They were all bright, floral and geometric prints that---to me---were so memorable I’d have trouble wearing them two seasons, no matter how many different basic, solid colors you can wear underneath. They also showed a line of ‘investment’ bling. “A woman should never leave the house without her bling” and if you bought into their spiel you’d be stacking bracelets up your arm like cord wood on an Amish farm. They talked about earrings and keeping them in scale but I stopped listening when they brought out the chunky hubcaps "for our bigger gals" that would elongate even a young person’s earlobes under their weight. Flabby, Golda Meir earlobes makes a person look older than gray hair and I fear them more than liver spots and arthritic knuckles. I did have fun at the trunk show, though, resisting the temptation to laugh in all the wrong places. Raise your hand if keeping up with fashion still matters to you. I really want to know.  ©

Moving Forward While Looking Back

The Farmers Market is a crazy, good place. Even this late in the season when---can you believe it---I saw my first Christmas commercial on TV! It’s not even October yet but you’ve got to get those Christmas presents put in lay-away, says K-mart. Hurry, hurry before all the good stuff is gone! Back on topic: the vendors at the market all must have produce coming out of their ears because Saturday they were giving unadvertised freebies. One of them gave me two pounds of string beans when I asked for one. The corn grower gave me ten ears of ‘peaches and cream’ instead of six. The green pepper and tomatoes dealer doubled my order. I smiled and thanked them all for their generosity, of course, but I can’t eat that much produce! And the guilt of wasting food always weighs heavy on my mind---especially now when there’s so many displaced and hungry refugees fleeing their war-torn homeland on the news.

Solution: At seventy-something years old, and for the first time in my life, I needed to learn how to blanch produce for the freezer. Pots, pans, boiling water and ice water. How hard could it be? Turns, out it’s not hard---just time consuming, especially if you count the part where you have to clean up the kitchen afterward. I didn’t think I could blanch the dozen peaches I came home with so I mashed them up like strawberries for shortcake. But I didn’t have a plan or solution for the extra tomatoes. Decades ago, I helped my mom make her famous chili sauce a few times but that was more complicated than I wanted to get into, so instead I’m eating tomatoes morning, noon and night. That’s a slight exaggeration but I did discover they taste good sprinkled with French’s Fried Onions. My mom’s favorite way to eat fresh tomatoes was sprinkled with sugar, my husband liked them with salt and pepper. I like them with McCormick Bac’n Bites but I didn’t have any in the house. I thought about using the dog’s Beggin Strips. They look like bacon, they smell like (rancid) bacon but they have yellow dye #5 in them and I’m allergic to that. Tonight I’m having a BLT for dinner made with bacon cheddar beer bread from the Farmers Market. I might have to make one for the dog. He loves everything that goes into BLTs. He’s very good about eating fruits and vegetables. 

Monday morning is my make-a-trip-to-the-auction-house day. The drive is about a half hour and it takes me through massive peach and apple orchids. Their picking is well underway. Packing crates were stacked higher than a house at several farms, ready to be transported to the canning plants. At one of the corn fields I went by there was a combine parked and ready to start cutting. It was old and probably paid for and it could only cut down four rows of corn at a time. When Don and I would go to heavy equipment bone yards to find parts for one of his three front-end loaders we’d run into farmers doing the same for their various farm equipment. 

Don could fix anything. One of my favorite memories involves going to a bone yard where Don and the owner spent several hours stripping parts off from an old Trojan loader while I sat in the truck reading. After Don paid the guy, the man handed me thirty dollars and said, “Make this guy take you out for dinner. You shouldn’t have rush to get a meal on the table after keeping him company all day.” Little did the man know I didn’t cook and going to a restaurant was a given. But the look on Don’s face when bills went from his hands to the guy’s, then three tens given to me was priceless. We would have stopped for hamburgers but I upgraded us to steak. When the owner of the bone yard died, his tombstone made the newspaper. It was a large, marble bulldozer and, of course, Don insisted that we had to go see it the next time we were down in that county.

I sold off all of Don’s heavy equipment within nine months of his stroke and this week I took his vintage toy farm and heavy equipment to the auction house. Already, Christmas stuff is showing up at the auction house and I did my part. I brought all of Don’s candles---ten sets---that were made by his favorite oil company, Socony-Vaccum. If you have any vintage Christmas candles and see a red Pegasus on the bottom you'll know you have angels, trees, snowmen, choir kids or deer that were made in the 1930s. I hated those candles. At vendor swap meets we had to keep them from melting in the sun and we couldn’t sell them on e-Bay in the summertime for fear they’d melt in shipping, yet Don kept buying every single one he saw at estate sales which only proves that not all dead husbands become perfect, pedestal candidates when they pass. He had his flaws…though time and distance do make them more endearing. ©