The Farmer's Market

Colony

Chapter 22: The Farmer's Market

The market opened at eight. Meg arrived at six-thirty to set up, the truck backed into the space at the end of the row that had been her space for twelve years, the space between the vegetable stand run by the Nguyen family and the empty lot where the flower vendor usually set up but who was absent today, traveling, the space familiar the way any space you occupied weekly for twelve years was familiar — the angle of the morning sun, the slope of the pavement, the distance to the outlet where she plugged in the table lamp she used to illuminate the display when the market opened in the gray of overcast mornings, the specific geography of a ten-by-ten square of asphalt that was hers on Saturdays from May to October.

She set up the folding table. She covered it with the white cloth. She arranged the jars — sixty of them, the one-pound hex jars with the Hollis Apiaries label, the amber catching the early light, the jars arranged in rows of ten, the rows staggered for visual effect, the arrangement that she had developed over the years and that was not artistic but was effective, was the arrangement that allowed the customer to see the product and read the label and reach for the jar without knocking over the other jars, the functional display of a person who sold honey rather than designed displays.

She set out the beeswax candles — hand-dipped tapers and molded pillars, the candles she made in the winter from the cappings wax she collected during extraction, the wax melted and filtered and poured into molds or used to coat wicks in the repeated dipping that produced the tapers, the candles a secondary product, a use for the material that would otherwise be waste, the beekeeper's economy of total use, nothing discarded, the wax becoming candles and foundation and lip balm and furniture polish, every byproduct of the hive finding a use because the hive produced nothing that was truly waste, the hive being one of the few production systems that operated at near-zero waste, the efficiency of an organism that had been optimizing its processes for twenty million years.

She set out the display frame — a single frame of capped honey sealed behind glass, the frame that she brought to every market, the frame that customers leaned over and peered at and exclaimed about, the frame that made the product real, that connected the jar on the table to the hive in the apiary, that showed the customer what the honey looked like before it was extracted, before it was strained, before it was bottled, the honey in its original form, in the bees' architecture, in the hexagonal cells that the bees had built and filled and capped, the cells visible through the glass, each cell a small room holding a small portion of the season's yield.

Diane arrived at seven. Her booth was adjacent to Meg's — the hazelnut booth, the bags of roasted hazelnuts and the hazelnut butter and the hazelnut brittle that Diane made in her kitchen using a recipe her mother had used and that Diane had modified by adding espresso powder, the modification being the only departure Diane had ever made from her mother's recipes and the departure being, in Diane's estimation, an improvement, the espresso deepening the caramel and complementing the nut in a way that her mother's recipe, good as it was, had not achieved.

Diane set up her table with the efficiency of a woman who had been selling at this market for fifteen years and who could assemble her booth in twelve minutes, the table and the cloth and the bags and the jars and the samples and the cash box appearing in sequence like the unfolding of a mechanism, each piece in its place, the place known by the hands rather than by the mind, the muscle memory of the market morning.

"How's the extraction going," Diane said.

"Halfway done. Should finish by Wednesday."

"Good year?"

"Good year. Better than last year. Maybe twenty-two hundred pounds total."

"That's a lot of honey."

"That's a lot of honey."

They set up in the parallel silence of two women who had been setting up beside each other for a decade, the silence that was not uncomfortable and was not empty but was the silence of a shared routine, the routine of the market morning that had its own rhythm, its own sequence, its own music — the sounds of the other vendors arriving and unloading, the clatter of folding tables, the thump of coolers, the murmur of greetings, the market assembling itself from its components the way a colony assembled itself from its bees, each vendor a worker, each booth a cell, the market a superorganism of commerce and community that existed for four hours on Saturday mornings and then disassembled and disappeared and reassembled the following Saturday, the weekly cycle that was the market's rhythm, the rhythm of the agricultural community expressing itself in the oldest form of commerce, the direct sale, the producer to the consumer, the handshake that was the transaction.

The customers arrived. They arrived the way customers arrived at a farmer's market — in waves, the early wave being the serious buyers, the people with lists and bags and the intention of purchasing, the people who came for specific products from specific vendors, the regulars, the customers who had been buying Meg's honey for years and who came to her booth first and bought their jars and moved on, the transaction brief and familiar, the exchange of money for honey accompanied by the exchange of greetings and the exchange of information — "How are the bees this year?" "Good, strong, the flow was good." "Is this the same as last year?" "Similar. More clover this year, less blackberry. The rain kept the clover going longer." — the exchange that was the market's conversation, the dialogue between producer and consumer that the grocery store had eliminated and that the farmer's market preserved, the dialogue that was the product's context, the story that accompanied the purchase.

Meg was not a natural salesperson. Meg was not a natural conversationalist. Meg was a beekeeper who sold honey because the honey needed to be sold and because the selling was part of the business and the business was part of the beekeeping, and if you kept two hundred hives and harvested twenty-two hundred pounds of honey you needed a way to sell twenty-two hundred pounds of honey, and the farmer's market was the way, the retail channel that allowed Meg to sell directly at twelve dollars a pound rather than wholesale at six dollars a pound to the natural foods store in Portland, the premium being the premium of direct sale, the premium of the face behind the product, the premium of the beekeeper standing behind her table and answering the questions and being the person, the real person, who had pulled the supers and uncapped the frames and spun the extractor and filled the jars.

But the market had taught her something. The market had taught her to talk. Not the way Diane talked — easily, warmly, the natural sociability of a woman who liked people and who expressed the liking in conversation and laughter and the kind of casual intimacy that Meg observed with the same fascination she observed the waggle dance, the communication that seemed effortless and that Meg knew was not effortless for her. But the market had taught Meg a version of talking, a market-talking, a mode of conversation that was bounded by the booth and the product and the transaction, a conversation with edges, with a subject and a scope, the conversation about honey, about bees, about the season, the conversation that Meg could have because the conversation was about the thing she knew, the thing she was confident about, the thing she could talk about the way she could talk about nothing else in her life — fluently, accurately, with the authority of a person who had done the thing for thirty years and who knew the thing in her body and who could answer any question about the thing without hesitation.

A woman approached the booth. She was a regular, a woman in her sixties, gray-haired, the canvas shopping bag over her shoulder, the bag that appeared at Meg's booth every other Saturday from May to October, the bag that always received three jars of honey, the same order every time, the consistency of a customer who had found the product she wanted and who saw no reason to change.

"Three jars," the woman said.

"Three jars," Meg said.

She placed three jars in a paper bag. She took the thirty-six dollars. She said, "Thank you, see you in two weeks," and the woman said, "See you then," and the transaction was complete, the exchange of honey for money, the exchange of greeting for greeting, the small commerce of two people who had been performing this exchange for years and who would continue performing it for years, the ritual of the market, the Saturday morning ritual that was one of the few social rituals Meg had maintained through the years of Gavin's absence, the ritual that she had not abandoned even during the worst year, the first year, the year of the couch and the television and the beer, even during that year she had come to the market because the honey needed to be sold and the selling was the obligation and the obligation was the thing that got her out of the house and into the world of people, the obligation that saved her from the complete withdrawal that the first year had tempted her with.

The morning passed. The jars diminished. The cash box filled. The conversations repeated — "How are the bees?" "How do you make this?" "Is this raw honey?" "What's the difference between wildflower and clover?" "Do you ship?" — the questions that Meg had answered a thousand times and that she answered again because each questioner was asking for the first time and the first time deserved the answer, the full answer, the answer that explained the bees and the flowers and the extraction and the straining and the bottling, the answer that was the story, the story that the label could not tell and that the jar could not tell and that only the beekeeper could tell, the beekeeper standing behind her table in her clean shirt and her clean jeans, not wearing the bee suit, not smelling of smoke, the market version of Meg that was different from the apiary version of Meg the way the bottled honey was different from the comb honey, the same substance in a different format, the same person in a different context.

Luz arrived at nine. She had not been to the market before — the market was Saturday, and Luz's schedule had been Monday through Friday, the apprentice's schedule, the working-week schedule that the apprenticeship had followed. But Meg had asked her to come, had asked her casually, had said, "If you want to see where the honey goes," and Luz had said, "I want to see," and the wanting was sufficient, was the answer that moved the asking from the casual to the committed, the answer that brought Luz to the market on a Saturday morning in August.

Luz stood behind the table with Meg. She looked at the jars, at the customers, at the market, at the whole apparatus of retail that was the final stage of the process she had been learning since March. She had seen the extraction. She had seen the bottling. She had not seen the selling, the moment when the jar left the beekeeper's hand and entered the customer's hand and the product became the customer's property and the beekeeper received the money and the money became the operation's revenue and the revenue became the fuel that ran the business that maintained the bees that made the honey that filled the jar that the customer was carrying away in a canvas bag.

"It's the last step," Luz said.

"It's the last step. The flower, the bee, the hive, the frame, the extractor, the jar, the market, the customer. The chain. Each step depends on the step before it. The customer depends on the market. The market depends on the jar. The jar depends on the extractor. The extractor depends on the frame. The frame depends on the hive. The hive depends on the bee. The bee depends on the flower. The flower depends on the rain and the sun. And we're at the end of the chain, here, selling the product that the chain produced, and the chain started with a drop of nectar in a clover floret in a field in the Willamette Valley in June, and it ends here, in a jar, on a table, in a parking lot, on a Saturday morning in August."

"That's the pitch," Diane said from the adjacent booth, arranging hazelnut brittle on a sample plate. "That's what you should put on the label. 'The chain started with a drop of nectar.' People would love that. People would buy that story."

"People are buying the honey," Meg said.

"People are always buying the story. The honey is how the story tastes."

A customer approached Luz's end of the table. A young man, mid-twenties, the look of a person who shopped at farmer's markets with the intentionality of a lifestyle, the reusable bag, the sunglasses, the deliberateness that was a form of consumption, the consuming of the experience of buying local, the experience that included the interaction with the producer, the asking of the questions, the performance of the interested consumer.

"Is this local?" the young man said.

Luz answered. Meg had not told her to answer. Meg had not given her the market-talking script. But Luz answered, and the answering was natural, was Luz's version of the market conversation, the version that was different from Meg's version because Luz was a different person with a different facility for speech, Luz's version being warmer, more expansive, more detailed, the biology teacher's instinct to explain combining with the beekeeper's knowledge to produce an answer that was both informative and engaging, the answer that told the young man where the apiaries were and what flowers the bees visited and how the honey was extracted and what the color and the flavor indicated about the nectar sources, the answer that was the story, the story that Diane had said people were buying, the story that Luz told naturally because Luz was a person who told stories, who communicated, who shared what she knew with the eagerness that was the teacher's defining trait, the eagerness that Meg had witnessed in the apiary and that was now expressing itself at the market, the same eagerness in a different context, the same person doing the same thing — sharing the knowledge — in a new venue.

The young man bought two jars. He walked away looking at the label, reading the words, connecting the jar in his hand to the story he had heard, the product and the narrative fused in the way that the market allowed, the way the grocery store did not.

"She's good at this," Diane said to Meg, quietly, while Luz talked to the next customer.

"She's good at everything," Meg said, and the saying was not hyperbole, was not the inflation of praise, was the assessment of a teacher whose student had exceeded the curriculum, whose apprentice had demonstrated the thing that the apprenticeship had aimed for and the additional thing that the apprenticeship had not aimed for, the ability to talk to people, to connect, to translate the apiary's work into the market's language, the ability that Meg did not have and that she recognized in Luz the way she recognized a good brood pattern — instantly, by sight, by the accumulated experience of seeing good and seeing not-good and knowing the difference.

The market peaked at ten. The crowd was thick. The aisles between the booths were full of people — families, couples, singles, the Saturday morning population of McMinnville's farmer's market, the cross-section of the valley's residents and visitors, the people who bought the produce and the honey and the hazelnuts and the bread and the flowers and the eggs and the meat and the cheese, the people whose purchases were the market's revenue and the market's revenue was the vendors' income and the vendors' income was the agricultural economy in its most direct form, the form that bypassed the distributor and the retailer and the warehouse and the supply chain and placed the farmer and the consumer in the same ten feet of asphalt, face to face, the transaction as simple as a jar and a bill and a "thank you" and a "see you next week."

Meg sold thirty-seven jars by noon. Luz had sold twelve of them. The selling was not Luz's job — the selling was not what the apprenticeship included — but the selling had happened because Luz was there and because Luz talked to people and because the talking led to the selling the way the waggle dance led to the foraging, the communication directing the behavior, the information producing the action, the story producing the sale.

The market closed at noon. Meg broke down the booth — table folded, cloth folded, remaining jars packed, cash counted, the routine of closing that was the reverse of the routine of opening, the daily cycle of the market contained in the six hours between setup and breakdown, the cycle that would repeat next Saturday and the Saturday after that and every Saturday until October, the cycle that was one of the cycles of Meg's year, the weekly cycle nested inside the seasonal cycle nested inside the annual cycle, the cycles within cycles that were the structure of the beekeeping life, the structure that replaced the structure that Gavin had been, the structure of the work replacing the structure of the marriage, the cycles replacing the person.

They loaded the truck. Diane loaded her truck. The parking lot emptied. The market disappeared — the booths folded, the tables collapsed, the tents struck, the asphalt bare, the space that had been a market for six hours returning to being a parking lot, the transformation so complete that a person arriving at one in the afternoon would see no evidence that anything had happened there, no trace of the community that had gathered and traded and talked, the market as ephemeral as the swarm, the gathering that formed and performed its function and dispersed.

Diane walked over. "Dinner," she said. "Tonight. My place. I have frozen lasagna and opinions."

Meg looked at Luz. Luz looked at Meg. The looking was the question and the answer, the glance that communicated without speech, the glance that said: yes, let's, the assent that was not verbal but was physical, was the nod, the slight inclination that moved through the air between them like the pheromone moved through the hive, the signal that said: yes, here, this, now.

"Okay," Meg said.

"Both of you," Diane said. "I have two lasagnas. I was feeling ambitious at the Costco."

They drove to Diane's in the evening. The three of them on the porch, the August evening, the valley below them, the hazelnuts and the grass seed and the vineyards and the distant coast range, the view that Meg had been seeing from this porch for ten years and that was the same view and was different because she was different, or was becoming different, the difference not dramatic, not visible in any single change but visible in the accumulation — the market where Luz had talked to customers, the dinner at Diane's that was the "maybe" from weeks ago becoming the "yes" of tonight, the arithmetic of two that was becoming the arithmetic of three, the social orbit expanding from the solitary circle of the winter to the wider circle of the summer.

The lasagna was adequate. The beer was cold. The conversation was the porch conversation — crops and weather and the market and the season — and the conversation was more than the porch conversation because Luz was there and Luz asked Diane about the hazelnuts with the same curiosity she brought to the bees, the curiosity that was genuine, that was the curiosity of a person who was interested in the world and who expressed the interest by asking and by listening, and Diane answered with the warmth that Diane brought to everything, and Meg sat between them and listened and drank her beer and felt the feeling, the feeling that was the feeling of the market expanded, the feeling of being among people, the feeling of the social organism functioning, the small colony of three women on a porch in the Willamette Valley in August with beer and lasagna and the view and the evening and the feeling that Meg did not name.

The feeling was belonging. Not the belonging of a place — Meg had always belonged to the valley, to the land, to the apiaries and the farms and the roads. But the belonging of people. The belonging of a person to other people, the belonging that she had let go when Gavin left, the belonging that she had withdrawn from when the colony of two became the colony of one, the belonging that she was now, tentatively, carefully, with the caution of a beekeeper approaching a new hive for the first time, the slow movements, the smoke, the patience — the belonging that she was beginning to reclaim, the belonging that was not the same belonging she had had with Gavin because nothing was the same, because the colony had changed, because the queen had changed, because the pheromone was different, but the belonging was belonging, was the connection to other organisms, the social bond that every social species required and that Meg had denied she required and that she was now, sitting on Diane's porch with a beer and a plate of Stouffer's lasagna, admitting she required.

She did not say this. She sat on the porch and she drank her beer and she watched the evening and she felt the belonging and the belonging was the honey, the belonging was the surplus, the belonging was the thing the season produced when the conditions were right.

The conditions were right.