Farmers' Markets

Under the invisible subway griminess, my hands are caked yellow-green with the thick sweat of tomatoes, whose rangy legs I've been breaking methodically, all day long. The Green Line flashes by, a more predictable, less elusive shade, no dusting in its paint of oily purple-black or pollen-gold. People's eyes dart over my hands, then away. Farm-maintenance days are always dirty, while harvest and market days are cleaner. I am vain about the dirt; I like looking at it on the subway, and like when other people look at it, and pretend not to. On the manicured, docile T, I give in a little to narcissism, and to a bit of glib internal poeticizing of the hard, communal, unheroic work I do.

Tomorrow the youth crews will swing full crates freighted with leaf and seedpod from hand to hand, into the back of out rattletrap red van, which I'll drive to market. As I start the engine a ragged cheer will rise, and in the rearview's jittery glass I'll see two young folk congratulate each other with a many-staged handshake, the sort of manual hip-hop dance they are perpetually inventing, slap-draw back-reverse-jerk-snap. They've created one to accompany an oft-dropped meme: the Pop-Lock-n-Drop-It handshake. Pop: the two fists connect, oriented so that two imaginary clutched batons would point perpendicular to the ground. Lock: knuckles touching, the wrists torque in opposite directions, so batons are horizontal. And Drop It: the fingers open, and phantom batons clatter side by side on the blacktop.

At the market I'll roll a curb, ignoring horns. Pilot the low-rolling vegetable boat though a sluggishly parting sea of tiny Latina children, whose mothers and big sisters herd them aside as they see the van. And ease between the tents, aged Russians more unresponsive to their immanent crushing than the toddlers, their dim but shrewd eyes fixed, myopic, on the spot where beets, dill, garlic and honey will soon appear. I lumber through the breach, the neighbor's hanging flowerpots brushing the hull. Then the human wake closing, and rising to lap and surge against the stand. The market coordinator staving them back, so the doors can open and the desired fruits be piled on the plastic folding tables. Much yelling and gesturing as the hell-bent old women descend on their favored ingredients like a creaking army of bees, their chatter in an acrobatic syllabary we can no more decipher or pronounce than the stinger-waving jive of apiaries. At least we can speak broken Spanish to the stream of Guatemalan and Salvadorian mothers who drift over to our stand from the Latino farmers next door, their bags stuffed with maize leaves for tamales. On a good day, we have a native speaker with us; otherwise we deploy our few words and stitch them together with the broad loops of gesture.

Long after the first rush, we usually see Destiny and her mom, or another favorite customer, Elena. Bleach-blonde and talkative in a front-porch rocking-chair manner, a thinning but still salty Greek accent overlays her fluent English, which gropes only occasionally for an obscure culinary term. She tells the intern stuffing her bag with spinach about making her own fila dough for spanakopita, beckoning periodically to encourage more spinach. She comes as much to talk as shop, and never leaves the stand without a detailed discussion of recipes, her family, and food philosophy.