The Farmer's Market

I love the Farmers Market. Back in 2001, I spent a couple months in California. They had a lovely Farmers Market down by the ocean. A few friends and I would walk down there most mornings, several miles there and back. We'd wander the market for hours, eating edible flowers and goofing off. They had the best candy covered roasted sunflower seeds. I almost always bought a little sack of them.

I took that walk by myself one morning, and on my way back I saw a sign for a open house sale. I turned, walking into the residential area, and went into the house. Now, this is only a half mile from the ocean, and only about 10 miles from LA, so this was a really nice housing development. Here I am, wide leg jeans, strappy tank top, no bra, and a black hoody, a soda bottle jammed into my back pocket. I wander around the house, and a lady is following me around. There's no price tags on anything. I ask her what's for sale and she tells me, "everything." There's boxes of things... a box of sweaters, a box of books, a box of linens etc... all along the wall of the great room.

I get nearer the dining room, just wandering and munching on my sunflower seeds, and I start to hear weeping. All the sudden, I realize what this is... It's an estate sale. I'm so unprepared for it, that I stop cold. I'd never been to one. I found them strangely tacky and disturbing, even while knowing that, logically, they're necessary. I stood there, hovering next to the doorway between the dining room and the great room, listening to two sisters weep and discuss their father's death. I looked back and the woman who'd been following me around looked sad, flustered, unsure of what to say to me. She tells me those are her sisters and that their father recently passed away. There I stood, a woman in my early twenties, poor, totally outside my element in this great house... and a voyeur to this incredibly personal moment bewteen siblings.

I stood a few minutes, torn between enraptured interest and awkward embarrassment, but thoroughly aroused by the feeling. At that time in my life, I was so innocent of such things, never having known any real suffering beyond my own. No death, no serious illness had ever touched my loved ones. I knew nothing of what they were feeling... yet, here I was, peeking into a world I knew nothing about.

I quickly reached into a box of accessories and pulled out a worn leather black belt. "How much for this?" I asked. "How about 50 cents?" she said.

I bought the belt, left, and when I stepped outside, I felt tremendously happy and lucky. Their sadness wasn't mine, and I suddenly felt so light-spirited and almost high with life. Every time my friends and I walked to that Farmers Market after that, I thought of that estate sale and those three sisters, and I loved on my friends a little more.