23 May Thursday

Author Rachel Simon writes “Happiness, I have grasped, is a destination, like strawberry fields.” Thus I find myself on the trusty Forty-Nine bus rolling towards our noble Civic Center, home of the San Francisco Public Library, and on Wednesdays, the Heart of the City Farmer’s Market. There’s an added treat: the Friends of the Public Library sale tables they set out once a week. I dropped my book into the return minidumpster looking thing, looked at the sale tables, and made my way to the market.

I like to walk around, amble really if I’m honest and look at the various fresh produce and etc. very carefully and deliberately. I love showing people that I am not in a hurry. My tote sack over my right shoulder, I accept a slice of fresh nectarine, a shiny red cherry, I nibble each and nod thoughtfully and approvingly, the way I imagine a French woman might. That’s it friends, going to the farmer’s market allows me to pretend to be a French woman who knows a lot about vegetables. Sophisticated.

Small and squeaky purple onions, check. Crisp heads of baby lettuce, bingo. Plump and pleasant first of season cherry tomatoes, you bet. Then, at the mouth of the market where the sidewalk meets the street, a vendor tent with one item and one item only. There, in large flats, glistening in the spring sunlight, a chorus of large, ruby red and picture perfect strawberries, their heads pointing toward the celestial conductor awaiting the cue to open in song. Like a bunch of Audry 2s from Little Shop of Horrors, they seem to be calling out to me, beckoning me forth. I imagine I’d have to open a vein or at least a capillary to feed these little guys, keep them ruby red, but no. The vendor was calling out to me, fruit in hand. I tasted the fruit. Perfection.

It was a little later in the afternoon, when farmers start to worry they will have to take some produce back to the farm (which they don’t want to do), so bargains are struck. One flat? $5. Three flats? 10. I was offered six flats for $15. So, I took my huge flimsy cardboard box of delicate strawberries back onto the Forty-Nine filled now with screaming teenagers, and got them home, an achievement on its own.

Another achievement- A new fridge is in place. An old fridge has been retired. It took a minute, but all is well and right and good. Then, I got ill. So, I convalesce. Chicken noodle soup.

New fridge interior. Exciting, I know. Regard the strawberries, bottom right.