by Melinda Hartel
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
~Marcel Proust
The first time my boyfriend told me he had gone to school in a one-room schoolhouse, I thought I was dating Abraham Lincoln. After more than three decades of marriage, I know now that age is not the biggest difference between us (12 years); there is also where and how we grew up: Me, urban Catholic. Him, rural Methodist.
Though he moved to Kansas City some 20-plus years before we met, my husband kept strong ties to the community where his parents (and their parents and their parents) lived, died, and were buried in the cemetery of the 1877 church. Several of his siblings still live in the community.
At some point, the subject came up of moving to our own farmhouse–a 1950 Dutch Colonial with seven acres we purchased from his parents as rental property. I was not enthusiastic, and we stayed in the suburbs. I’m a solid Townie if not exactly a City Girl.
Through many conversations, however, the idea emerged of creating a gardening experience to share with our intellectually disabled daughter. We envisioned a farmers market business–a family project–and not just our own family but several others who also had young teens with disabilities. We dubbed ourselves “Heart of The Market” and pitched in for a vendor stall.
It quickly became obvious, however, that my husband and I were the only parents in the group really into it, and by the following year, we were sole proprietors of Sweet Bunny Farm and Flowers (named after our daughter’s pet rabbit).
She was, in many ways, the driving force behind our market adventure. For 16 years, most every Saturday from May to October, she helped my husband set up our stall by 7 a.m. Friendly and talkative, she spent the rest of the morning chatting up other vendors and customers–she knew everyone and everyone knew her. By the time I rolled in with our just-cut flowers around 9, she’d be sprawled out in the back of our old van, sleeping off biscuits and gravy, or a cinnamon roll and coffee.
Some years, Sweet Bunny Farm and Flowers was more farm, at other times, more flowers. The dry, hot weather guaranteed some crop was always about to fail. We grew peaches and apples and blackberries even after swarms of Japanese Beetles descended in Biblical numbers and began devouring the foliage. A rotund woodchuck took up residence in one of the sheds, despite multiple eviction notices, and gorged himself (evidently) on young cabbage and cantaloupe. Hungry deer got after the beans and peas; rerouting them with electric fencing was minimally successful. Raccoons ravaged the sweet corn and then (weirdly) the Indian corn planted to discourage them. Who eats Indian corn?
I get it. We’re all just trying to survive.
More than once, my husband considered ditching the labor-intensive produce completely; flowers, he said, don’t have to be washed. And you don’t have to bend over to pick them. He’s a practical man who enjoys his food, though, and never made good on that threat. We sold mostly basic vegetables and fruits that people who don’t cook much know what to do with, ie., potatoes, carrots, onions and Heirloom tomatoes. In July and August, customers lined up for those homely Heirlooms. (Never trust a pretty tomato.) He lamented the generations of folks who grow up not knowing what real food tastes like–the stuff that hasn’t been hybridized for sturdiness in shipping, a long shelf life, and maximum visual appeal.
I used to call market mornings “date night.” Like many couples with disabled kids, we had had relationship struggles. The market became our “Third Thing”–something that wasn’t all about our daughter but still included her. Indeed, even after moving to a supported living home a decade ago, she still came to visit us at the market, towing along a roommate and one of their assistants. The three of them would make their giggling rounds–buying things, eating things, petting dogs.
The little intimacies born of those Saturday mornings–simple things like sharing a ziplock bag of homemade cookies purchased from a fellow vendor–helped steady our relationship. My husband would tease me about the amount of water I put in customers’ bouquet bags; I’d pointedly ignore him and promise a goldfish with their next purchase. We joked about Millennials not carrying cash (“Can you Venmo a tomato?”) as well as people’s weird fear of any peppers but bells (“Don’t touch that, Little Frankie! It’ll put your eye out!”)
We saw many sellers come and go over the years. Sometimes, the reasons were obvious: You just can’t sell enough cake pops to make all that effort worthwhile. And in case it needs saying, selling at a farmers market takes a lot of effort. More produce vendors began bringing in fruits and vegetables purchased wholesale, and we could hardly blame them. If he thought too much about all the time he spent planting, harvesting, hauling, and selling, my husband said he would never consider farming. He jokingly referred to it as a Ponzi scheme.
But we enjoyed it, and we kept on, week after early morning weekend, season after season. Two surgeries and difficult recuperations later, however, my husband decided to close our market business. He wasn’t feeling well enough, and he wasn’t feeling it. He said it was too much work to be, well, just work. And he was restless to do something else, something new.
I can’t argue with that. He’s the farmer, not me. I don’t know one end of a hoe from another. I couldn’t tell a zucchini from a cucumber in a lineup. And the only place I want to be at 7 a.m. is on my couch, drinking coffee.
I’m going to miss it though. I already do. People liked my bouquets, and that made me happy (and more than a little proud). I have no formal floral training. On the contrary, my creative process has been likened to Edward Scissorhands–a frenzy of clipping and snipping that sends zinnias, sunflowers, celosia, and rudbeckia flying about in a scented cloud of cinnamon basil until–somehow–the beautiful thing takes shape.
I think, most of all though, I’m going to miss the people at the market. We met some truly wonderful folks, mostly older couples who communicated wordlessly and fluently in a language my husband and I are still learning. They would carefully steer each other through the stalls, leaning into or onto one another, clutching hands and well worn coin purses and making only sensible purchases (produce, an occasional baked good, never crafts). They came every weekend for years until, like Puff the Dragon’s child chum, Jackie Paper, one day they simply came no more.
Those memories are golden. I can’t think of anything I’d rather have been doing on a summer morning for 16 years.
But I am determined to look to the future. My husband is 72 now and I’m 60. Should we hike? Take a cooking class? Ballroom dance? Nothing feels quite right, but I’m eager to find another “Third Thing” for us to do together. He is quiet by nature, yet I fear the silences that drift in like a heavy fog when our lives become too separate.
I also fear the kayak that has mysteriously appeared in our garage.
I am very motivated.
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photo credit: Shelly Pauls, Unsplash
Melinda Hartel did a little freelance writing several lifetimes ago but hasn’t penned anything but letters for years. She is retired from senior care and now spends her time hawking flowers her husband Neil grows and calling bingo for Special Olympics (her real talent). She has a degree in English from Missouri State University.