Farm Stand, Catskills

This week you weren’t a stranger at all because you happily told me your name — Irene — while you weighed each vegetable on your scales as tenderly as if it were our own newborn. We’d stepped out the car and all the cliches had come tumbling out our mouths, fat and shameless as peaches. (It’s so good to be in nature! You don’t realize how badly you need to get out of the city until you leave! Ugh I feel like I can breathe properly!) And then we’d descended on your farm stall like escapees from a penal colony. The penal colony being north Brooklyn, where a new “upstate” themed cafe had just opened in our neighborhood. I’d bought a cold brew there before we left, silently eyeing all the “artisanal” upstate things, packaged in the kinds of receptacles that had weathered decades of unremarkable utilitarianism before suddenly being thrust into the realm of the aspirational.

The jars of the “upstate” cafe reminded me of a party years ago, where the host served cocktails in jam jars and I was dumbfounded. Couldn’t he afford glasses? They were like, one dollar each from Ikea! Clearly, I was the only person who found it hysterical and embarrassing and even vaguely scandalous — as if we were all gamely struggling through rural privations, instead of gathering in this Williamsburg loft to watch a Japanese kitsch-horror classic. (It had taken me months to realize that I was the unsophisticated one.) And now, nearly a decade on, “Brooklyn” the brand has reached such a saturation point that Brooklyn the place is branding itself “upstate.” Here we were, upstate, escaping Brooklyn for the place Brooklyn was now aping.

Which, in our eager-to-be-enchanted eyes, was aping nothing, just being its bountiful, guileless self on a long and lazy July weekend. You beamed as you piled up our box with tomatoes and corn and zucchini and radishes and boxes of strawberries the size of dimes, and your warmth did not waver one iota when we realized, with shame and dismay, that in all our excitement we hadn’t actually checked our wallets and now we were twelve dollars short and this place was, naturally, cash only.

You had large eyes and what novelists like to call a “generous mouth” (I’d been reading James Salter). If your face had a sound it would be a C major chord, struck gently, sounding out ease and plenty. You told us we could just come back later and it was no problem and that we shouldn’t rush. We rushed like the FBI was after us. It took time to find an ATM and I felt pained by the possibility of you even wondering for a second about us not coming back. Finally, here I was, jogging out the car with dollars in my fist for you. A young woman tending trays of tomatoes spotted me. “Irene!” she sang, “Your peeps are here!” I was your peeps! I had a few moments to savor this before you turned around to the faintly stupefied grin I could now feel on my face. “Oh you didn’t have to rush back!” you said warmly. We’d been about an hour, by my estimate.

As we drove off with our car full of vegetables we discussed your extraordinary niceness, Irene. A couple of onions escaped the box and rolled around on the backseat. Shall we just move here, let’s just move here, we said to each other, knowing that we wouldn’t.