It is evident by their plain white plastic bags full of in-season produce that some of the people passing by my window are coming up the bridge from the farmers’ market.
The Farmers’ Market: a place where the high tech and fast moving people of the city can buy homely knick knacks and Healthy Food that is grown slow and steady somewhere out in the country. The cherries are juicy, the raspberries hold their shape, and the fruit-stained faces of children running around underfoot attest to the goodness of Earth’s candy.
At the farmer’s market you can buy wicker furniture. I don’t know what wicker is or how it grows or how it’s made to function as furniture, but the Farmer does. He’s the man with blue jeans broken in by working, not sitting. There are no phone marks worn into the thigh-denim. His hat is dirty, from dirt. Soiled. When you’re not buying his furniture he is whittling away at his own fingernails with a pocket knife, and meticulously organizing the snot in the back of his throat with short snorts and coughs.
He walks with a limp. His askew hat is symbolic of his spine, whose vertebrae have been twisted and strained and smashed to such extent that it would resemble a pukka-shell necklace under x-ray. He has a scar on his leg from the god damned thresher. He chews on wheat, with half your teeth and twice the contentment. The farmer plucks flies out of the air with his big leathery mitts and pops them directly into his mouth. “No sense wasting good protein,” he will say to anyone caught watching this feeding display. Then he winks and returns to thinking about how to position the new grain silo to minimize wind erosion.