I’d like to start this blog update by stating a few
things. I keep thinking I need to make
this blog less personal: more about the
business, more professional. Those are valid thoughts full of merit and
good old common sense. That said, I don’t
think it is going to happen. Because
what I’m doing here on Mineral Springs doesn’t rate a whole lot on the scale of
common sense. Common sense has my butt
back over at Durham Tech learning the latest computer programming language and
updating my dinosaur COBOL language skills.
Common sense has me doing anything other than growing food on my little
1.69 acre lot in East Durham County while simultaneously raising a house full
of kids. So to hell with professional
blog posts. Buy my produce and read my
blog because you see my passion. Because
you love my story. Because you believe
it’s real and good and right.
With that out of the way, a few weeks back I made a FaceBook
post that said “There are few things in this world
better than the first sniff of tomato plant in April....”. My mom responded with a comment about how she’d
marked me somehow in those first precious years while as a baby I sat in my
bouncy chair watching her weed and tend her flower beds. We had really pretty flower beds at that
house on Crow’s Foot Road. My mom’s
comment got me thinking. She *did* mark
me. As did both sets of my
grandparents. I was always out-of-doors
as a kid: helping in the family
vegetable gardens, helping with yard work, helping barn tobacco, sitting under
the porch shelter shucking corn, putting on skits in the yard with my sister while
both Grand & Great-Grand-mas shelled peas.
As a parent myself, I find my kids
are *so much easier* to take out-of-doors.
Fussy babies calm immediately when walked into fresh air. They sit happily in bouncy chairs while the
birds sing. They watch you pull weeds
unflinchingly in their Bumbos. Big kids fight
further away while you set out tomato plants.
They even give you a wide berth as they reach the teen years, knowing if
they come too close you are damn sure going to put them to work. Yes, parenting and the great-out-of-doors, it’s
a good match. So as I’ve been kicking this around in my
brain for a few weeks, I’ve thought “I really ought to write my next blog
update as an ode to Mom … a little Mother’s Day gift in a year I can’t afford
to do too much anyway”.
While that idea has been kicking
away in my brain, I’ve also started back at market. Forgive me Mom, but I’ve realized the post I
really need to write is not about you (even though you did mark me in an
incredible way); it’s about Grandma. It
has hit me so many times how perfectly full circle my being at market really
is. See, when I was a kid, I helped my
Grandma sell food at a curb market. From
middle school through college years I’d help her. LaMuriel Sutton sold the most delicious
home-cooked Southern food every Friday evening at the Goldsboro Curb
Market. As a pre-teen and then teen, I
would go every Friday afternoon to help her sell her homemade chicken salad,
chicken pastry, collards, turnips, cream style corn, pineapple cake, sweet
potato pie, coconut pie, and on and on and on.
Not only would I help her at market, I also recruited my best friends
(still my best friends today), Denise and Stephanie to help. They’d tag along and Grandma would pay them
in food. Their moms wanted them to help
because that meant Grandma’s chicken salad in the fridge over the weekend and
her banana nut bread for Saturday breakfast.
Holiday breaks from school were spent helping Grandma in the kitchen, stirring
that cream-style corn that would stick if not stirred constantly, washing the
never ending dishes, icing cakes, folding cake and pie boxes.
I remember that once I was in
college and Grandma’s health started failing that the family pressured her to
quit that darn market. She didn’t make
any money. Why did she insist on working
all week to make just a few hundred dollars on a Friday night? Her kitchen and house were completely
overtaken by this lifestyle: TWO ovens
in the kitchen, mammoth tables built especially for cake assembly lines dwarfed
the kitchen, and ridiculous amounts of cooking supplies, quart, pint and
half-pint cups, cake boxes and such crowded the overly large pantry built especially
accommodate her occupation. As a college
kid, I agreed. She needed to
retire. It was too much. The pay off wasn’t enough.
As an adult, an adult who also finds
herself at a market, who refuses to look at the hourly wage she is earning because
it is too depressing to contemplate, I get it.
Oh man, do I ever get it. Grandma
LOVED what she was doing. She believed
she was making a difference in people’s lives.
She was providing them with wholesome home cooked food when they were
too busy with life to provide that for themselves. She was connected with her customers. She knew their names, their likes, their
dislikes, their kids, their cousins, their flaws, their virtues. And she loved to cook. Really loved it.
Holy crap on a stick: I am my grandmother. I really love being at market. I really love my CSA families. I love what I do. I dream about it. I think about it all day. I work like a dog and fall in bed with dirty
knees, hair full of pollen, and stinky pits only to wake up and do it all again
the next day. It makes no sense. No sense at all. And I don’t care.
So Grandma, Happy Mother’s Day. I love you, beyond words, beyond sense.
