Support Your Local Farmers’ Market
She’s hard to miss, walking through the farmers’ market in her blue dress dotted with white polka dots and her wide brimmed white straw hat. Red curls tumble to her waist, held together at the nape of her neck with a bow that matches her dress. She holds a basket over one arm and a white lace parasol in her other hand, providing her with additional protection from the weight of the summer sun. So I don’t understand why no one looks at her.
It’s cash and barter only at this market, but I don’t see her exchange words with anyone, and no one notices when she picks up something from a table and leaves something else in its place. I slip into a stall she’s just left and examine what she’s left behind. It’s a jar, filled with a dark red, almost opaque viscous substance. A honey, maybe, or a jelly?
I came here for makings for a salad for dinner tonight, but dinner is now forgotten. I trail after her, entranced.
Her shoes aren’t stilettos but they’re still not practical for the market—stacked wedges, with strips of fabric that cross her toes and the arches of her feet and wrap around her ankles, tied with more bows. She doesn’t stumble once on the uneven pavement. There’s something about her movements that fascinates me, an almost preternatural grace. Or maybe I could forget the ‘almost’ part, because suddenly she turns and stares at me, and her green eyes are too bright beneath her thick lashes, spearing me in place and driving the breath from my lungs.
I try to break eye contact, but I’m frozen in place, until she smiles and shakes her head. And then she’s gone, disappeared into the crowd, parasol no longer bobbing above the moving heads.
I try to forget her as I browse the selection of wild mushrooms, making my selections. Try to forget the impression that her teeth had seemed a bit too sharp, or that her grass green eyes didn’t have pupils. Once I make my purchase, I retreat to the shelter of the small tables set up near the food booths, a cup of shaved lemon ice in one hand. I close my eyes as I savor the sharp tang and the underlying hint of bitterness, and a voice sounds behind me.
Before I open my eyes. I know it’s her.
“Um.” I clear my throat, which is suddenly dry. “Of course. Please.”
The smile she graces me with causes the hairs on my arms to stir as she sets her basket down on the table. The memory of her eyes has already faded and their vividness, brighter than her dress, strikes me again. She has pupils, but they’re mere pinpricks in a sea of green, and the whites of her eyes are whiter than bleached cotton.
She sets her basket on the table and I try not to look inside, but I can’t help myself. It distracts from her otherness and satisfies my curiosity—what could such a creature want from our little market? Apparently, the answer to that question is a variety of herbs, a bundle of carrots, a braided rope of garlic, and a staggering assortment of peppers. A few of the jars she’d been leaving around the market remain. They are all labeled, but I can’t make out what’s written on them.
She has a cup of iced tea. I can smell peaches and mint. After a long sip from the straw, pointed teeth denting the compostable paper straw, she sets her cup down next to the basket and digs in between the produce, pulling out a bright yellow metal cannister. As she pops the lid off, she says, “Sunscreen.”
I wrinkle my nose in anticipation as she squirts some foam into her palm, then relax as instead of the harsh chemical scent I expected, I smell only lemons.
“What brand is that?” I ask, meeting her eyes gaze and then skittering away as she smooths the foam on her arm.
She angles the can towards me so I can read the label. “It’s for surfers, but it’s one of the few I’ve found that doesn’t reek. I’ve got a rather sensitive nose,” she tells me.
“Me too,” I say, wincing at the inanity of the statement. I look up again, and then away, as she’s moved from her arms to her neck and the front of her chest, pale creamy flesh above the vee of her dress that would put a marble statue to shame.
“I probably don’t need another coat, but I’ve got to be careful. Number one risk group for skin cancer, you know.”
She doesn’t look like she’s ever spent more than five minutes in the sun in her entire life. Her skin has an unearthly glow, as if moonlight had taken earthly form. I concentrate on my ice as she moves down to her legs. She twists her shapely ankles this way and that, working the foam into the exposed skin between the fabrics.
“Have you ever sunburned your feet?” she asks. “It’s the worst.”
“Can’t say that I have,” I said, taking another bite of my ice. She reminds me of the dessert—sweet, but with an underlying edge, a hidden bite just waiting to surface.
“It’s cute, how you’re trying so hard not to stare,” she said, and there it is. I choke on my mouthful of ice.
“I’m not…. I mean I didn’t….” I stammer.
“I know. It was an observation. Most people can’t see me at all, and those that do are rarely so polite.” I dare to meet her eyes again, and she’s smiling. She holds out one elegantly manicured hand to me, nails a deep red that contrasts with her hair. “I’m Tryamon. Tria to my friends.”
I hesitate before taking her hand, and her smile takes a wry twist at my hesitation. It’s dry and warm, and her grip is firm. “Michaela,” I tell her.
“Ah! Who is like God,” she says, and I blink in surprise. “Charmed, Michaela. Thank you for the company.” And with that, she stands. She removes a jar and puts her cup of tea in its place, then picks up her basket. “Maybe we’ll meet again.”
I belatedly stand as she walks away. “Wait! You forgot your jar!”
“Enjoy it,” she says without turning her head. “It’s a gift, freely given and with no ties attached. No harm shall come to you from it.” Bemused, I watch her go, wondering now what will happen to those for whom jars she had left without such a promise. ‘Pomegranate Habanero Jelly’ is handwritten on the small label on the front of the jar in an elegant and archaic script. I turn it around in my hands, but there’s nothing else. Looking up, I see she’s disappeared. I look for her, but she’s nowhere to be found in the market. I forget about my ice while I search and by the time I remember it, it’s slush.
Normally I’d go to the farmers’ market once every few weeks, sometimes going a month or two in between visits. I begin to go every week, hoping to run into Tryamon—Tria—again.
I never see her, but I do notice the absence of familiar faces. There are rumors of staid lives upended and travels unexpected, but fresh faces come in to take their places and things return to normal.
Eventually, I open the jar. The sweetness comes with a hidden bite, the pepper flavor infused somehow into the jelly. Much like its maker, I think. I make it last, a spoonful every week or so, but eventually I come to the bottom of the jar. Each night after I’ve eaten some, I dream of strange and wonderful lands just out of reach, but in the mornings the dreams fade and the only reason I remember them at all is because I’ve written them down.
Rereading my notes about those dreams, I wonder if those jars of jelly that were left like changeling babies, foods in exchange for the fruits of others’ labors, had prompted those missing faces to go in search of these mythic dreamlands. I guess I’ll never know.
I’ve filled the jar with glass marbles and set it on my windowsill, above the kitchen sink, where the morning light shines through them. It fills my kitchen with a kaleidoscope of color that hints at the wonders that wait on the other side of sleep.
Eventually I’ll forget, and then I’ll wonder why I thought a mason jar was so important as to keep, and I’ll fill it myself with some preserved goods, or donate it to the thrift store, and the notebook will disappear in a drawer, and the wonder of it all will fade away. I don’t know whether to regret this or look forward to it. But that day has not yet come, so I’ll poke at the memory while it remains.
In the meantime, my kitchen has rainbows.
