Good day (2011)

It's a rare occurrence when just the sight if something leaves me speechless.

Last Saturday I found the market an hour before it closed, whizzed my car into a spot and was in a mighty hurry to snatch vegetables and yummy snacks.

I was covering a story for the paper and Zach wanted to go to get food for the week, so we made a date out of it.

So we arrived and we were having casual conservation, but as we get close enough to get the feel for the crowd something changed.

I took one look and stopped still.

The weather was perfect, children played in the lot,  musicians tried out songs for tips. Booths piled high with bins full of homegrown vegetables met my eyes. Freshly baked bread lined tables,  and that fresh, growing smell of countless green things tumbled together greeted my nose.  I walked slowly in, amidst tables of seedlings and cheese stands. Hunkered next to stands of fresh, local beef were fresh flower and craft stands.

I wanted to stop, right there in the entrance, to take all the toppling beauty in, for that market jolted my soul. Some sleeping part of my heart that once lived, and loved, much closer to the earth was awakened.

Even though I am thoroughly immersed in technology and the university atmosphere presently, I did spend my last few years in Kentucky. My grandparents and aunt had acres of land where I spent many summers. There were three ponds and a garden that bore bright vegetables, which we fought daily battles with ferocious bugs to cull a few, ruby-sheened tomatoes. But all of it was my delight, all of it a new world for my taking and my just-wakened little soul was keenly aware of every whisper and scent of the earth as it sidled up to greet me. The musty damp of a barn corner, the heady green scent of fresh-mown grass, the fragile perch of a butterfly in my hand.

I couldn’t have said it out right, but some hushed corner of my heart knew that my outdoor world was rife with wonder, with growth that never ceased, colors that waxed and waned, scents that came to me as if from another world.

I hunger for that in my modern, streamlined life. Sometimes, amidst a day of cars and phone calls, social networking and computers, I yearn for earthiness with something akin to homesickness.

One step though, in the Farmer's Market, and I was back in the tumbled, gorgeous world of my childhood, where every corner of creation whispered a secret I yearned to know.

That afternoon, I shook myself back to reality and grilled all kinds of tasty treats. The meal was perfection.

 I was sad to leave this small world of a place in which the wonder of my childhood greeted me at the entrance. The sight compounded all the old mystery I felt, all the remembered savor of earthy things into a few words of wonder.