My neighbor, frank, a transplant from the city who likes to give me unsolicited advice about liability insurance, was pulling into my drive just as she left.
« You see that, Beau? » Frank yelled, leaning out of his shiny truck. « I told you! You gotta get cameras. Or shut it down. People today? No morals. They’ll bleed you dry. »
I looked at the dust settling on the road. « Maybe, » I said.
« It’s the economy, » Frank grumbled. « Makes wolves out of sheep. Lock it up, Beau. »
I went inside. I looked at my ledger. I was in the red. Again. The logical thing to do was to close the stand. Or put a padlock on the cooler. Frank was right. You can’t run a business on good vibes and nostalgia.
But I couldn’t get the image of that woman’s slumped shoulders out of my head. That wasn’t the posture of a thief. That was the posture of a mother who had to choose between gas for the car and dinner for the table.
The next morning, at 4:00 AM, I went out to the barn.
I collected the eggs. I sorted the vegetables. Usually, I wash the potatoes until they shine. I polish the peppers. I make sure everything looks supermarket-perfect because that’s what the new people in the subdivisions expect.
Today, I did the opposite.
I took the biggest, most beautiful Russet potatoes—the ones that would bake up fluffy and perfect—and I rubbed a little wet dirt back onto them. I took the eggs that were slightly different shades of brown, the ones that were perfectly fresh but didn’t look uniform in a carton, and set them aside. I took the prize-winning heirloom tomatoes and found the ones that were shaped a little weird, the ones that looked like kidneys or hearts instead of perfect spheres.
