Home is Where the Community Is

I can't get to the farmer's market and back in less than three hours these days. Most of the farmers know me well enough that each booth consists of 5 minutes of buying and 20 minutes of catching up on the last week. And that's just the farmers. That doesn't count other friends I'm always bumping into at the market.

I also have to be careful with my stock of canned goods. Everyone wants to trade. Without prudence I'd end up trading all of my peach butter and crabapple jelly for hand-pulled mozzarella, cakes, tomatoes, breads, apples, any virtually anything else for sale at the market. They're all worthy trades, but I like crabapple jelly too.

Next week Nathan is bringing me a 50 pound bag of Colorado grown beet sugar (he gets wholesale prices through his pickling business). Laura and her husband are bringing me hand-poured beeswax candles from their own honeybee hives - the wax is a rich, dark, aged wax and is poured into 100 year old pinecone molds from Germany. Lou is bringing some pictures of a brook trout he carved out of poplar for another client so I can decide if I want him to make one for me. Christian wants to talk about supplying me with winter squash until spring, even if it means cutting into what he sells to local restaurants. "I think you'd make better use of it," he told me with a smile. Jeni owes me a box of apples and I owe Kate and Marcy some crabapple jelly for trades I made with them today. Keri keeps insisting I come out and ride her horses and help her butcher goats on the farm. I spent half an hour talking to Brian (he's my age) about how he wants to expand his beekeeping operation and do that full time, but can't afford a farm anywhere near Boulder because of all the lawyers and Californians who've bought up the land for their mansions. We also talked about our disdain for Facebook and peoples' over-dependance on cell phones and technology, and the shame of today's throw-away society. I can't walk five feet without someone calling out my name and waving from a booth, asking how my week was, or telling me about the frost that put an end to their peppers this season, or inviting me to dinner at their home or out for a locally brewed beer at the Mountain Sun. Strangers stop me and comment on how much they love my wagon, and marvel when they find out that someone of my relatively young age makes apple butter and pumpkin pies from scratch. Last weekend a woman asked where I had gotten my bag of cilantro. I told her it was the very last in the whole market, because I had already scoured every booth looking for whatever I could find. I happily gave her half of what I had. She offered to pay me but I refused and she left just beaming. I was beaming too, because these are my people and it makes me happy to share this whole wonderful thing with them.

It's clear that the market is a lot more to me than just food. It's my community. For me it offers hope that people can be brought together under the common banner of food and simple living, that the greatest joys are to be found not in material possessions or the number of Facebook connections you have or the prestige of your career, but in the everyday acts of living, loving and eating well. Sometimes I carry a heavy heart, feeling trapped by a materialistic, corporatized world of excess and perceived luxury. But the market reminds me that there are yet places that exist on the margins of that world, that real community and self-sufficiency is possible, and proof that such places can offer more joy and honest living than any amount of plastic technocrap from China. To all the farmers of this great land who spend your days planting and harvesting, who make it your life's work to sustain the integrity of our environment and our food, and who honor the age-old human institution of agriculture by participating in it and not mechanizing it - to all of you who deliver to us each week by the sweat of your brow the bounty and the beauty of cultivation, I say thank you. From the depths of my heart, thank you. You are backbone of this country. You keep the breath of life in the American ideals of pride, craftsmanship, hard work, beauty, freedom, independence and most of all the neighborly love that comes with a real community. I cherish these things deeply, and thus I cherish you because you embody them. A million times thank you.