It's the Little Things....

Every week in my town, on Tuesday afternoon, we have a Farmer's Market.  I've erroneously called it a "Street Fair," "Downtown Marketplace," and "That Thing Where People Sell Stuff That I Don't Really Need."  The last title seems to be the most descriptive.  Apparently, however, there is, indeed a market for alpaca sweaters, fake cashmere scarves, and cups that turn a different color when you pour something hot into them.  The most visited part of the Farmer's Market is the food "court."  Here they hawk homemade soul food, complete with sweet potato pies, gyros, churros, frozen salmon, some sort of middle eastern food that looks strangely like a burrito to me, and the ever present - smell it all the way down the block - kettle corn.  I see old people on their bright red (is that the only color they make?) electric scooters.  If their basket isn't filled with a little shivering dog of some sort, it is laden with fresh fruit, yams the size of Popeye's forearm, and gerber daisies in a rainbow array of colors.

I tend to stick to the end of the street where they sell the fruit and veggies.  Strawberries.  One will fit in the palm of your hand, and, if it is mid-season, you can buy three baskets of these monsters for five bucks.  There is one table that has mushrooms of every variety known to man.  I can only imagine what their garden smells like.  Not to be outdone, there are apples, plums, apricots, and something called pluots.  Apparently the plum tree and apricot tree got too close to one another one night.  There is even a guy with a bucket in his hand, tongs in the other, asking everyone if they feel like a nut.  I always tell him that sometimes I feel like a nut, but today I don't.  Hey, it seems like the appropriate answer.

I always stop by the incense table.  You can't beat twelve sticks for a dollar. I always peruse the homemade jewelry.  The problem with their table is that I have stood in the aisles of the local craft store and seen how much the beads are and how relatively simple it is to make those damn earrings... and I refuse to pay twenty-five bucks for a pair of earrings that I know the parts to make it only cost about two dollars.  I always check out the lady that makes and sells knitted scarves.  I knit scarves.  I have enough in a bag behind my couch to probably make a profit if I set up my own stand.  I always wonder how on earth she knitted that many scarves in a week.  I can get one or two done in a month and then my thumbs start to hurt and I drop stitches. She claims she gets one done per day. She has about two hundred or so of them in her kiosk. Either no one is buying them, or she has a machine. She sits there quietly knitting the newest edition... acting like she pumps out 200 of the suckers a week. No way. They are reasonably priced though. At the rate I take to knit a scarf and how much I charge per hour, my scarves would have to be priced somewhere in the three hundred dollar range.

The end of the street has a big truck that sells rotisserie chicken.  People are lined up for that.  I'm guessing they don't want to go home and cook dinner, and a whole chicken and a bag of fries is the next best thing.  It smells good, but I am just not convinced that it is the healthiest of environments in which to cook chicken.  Behind the chicken truck, an odd place for this next display if you ask me, the local humane society puts up little cages with sad looking little puppies just begging to be taken home.  They sit there quietly, fooling you into thinking they don't bark or yap or beg.  Their big, sorrowful eyes make me actually stop and consider scooping one up nearly every week.  I am always thwarted by the price tag though.  I've often wondered if the dog pound really wants to get rid of the little buggers.  At those prices, the earrings a block down the street seem like the better bargain. I wonder if this is where those old people scooter baskets are picking up their passengers?

Tuesdays are great.  Farmer's Market makes it that much better.  Oh, I rarely go home with anything more than enough strawberries to keep us fruited up for the week and a pack of patchouli incense sticks to make the house smell like ... well, patchouli... but the crowds with their environmentally safe reusable bags stuffed with flowers and leafy vegetables, the hawkers trying to sell me their wares, the smell of kettle corn and a quick nuzzle of the puppy at the end of the street makes Tuesdays one of my all-around favorite days of the week.