How Farmers' Markets Healed Me

There was a time that I lived in the Blue Ridge mountains by myself.

I was 20 and in college. I was broke, working several jobs, and borrowing money to pay rent through the summer. And most of all, I was very, very alone.

I was unbelievably determined to graduate college and earn my degree, and I had to stay on the mountain (as they say in Boone) through the summers to complete my curriculum and keep my apartment lease. That was the summer of 2008 and 2009, just when the bottom fell out of the economy and my parents went through bankruptcy. I had in one moment been fully dependent, and the next day I paid for all my things, no net beneath me. Gas was, well, much like it is now. Crazy. I couldn’t afford to even drive out of town, so I was secluded in an empty college town in the summers.

Growing up, I had seen the way my mom lived very dependently on my dad, and how that was often, unfortunately, a card played to suppress, control, and belittle her. I say this with gravity, as both of my parents are still a part of my life, and I love them both, but it was an important part of my motivation to do whatever it took to earn my own degree. For her, and others I had met around the world who showed me how lucky I was to have the opportunity to receive higher education, I was determined to graduate.

My heart breaks with compassion for that tenacious and lonely young woman who was trying her hardest to be strong, wise, and capable. To not just survive, but also thrive a little. I was a kid learning how to be an adult without any help, and I was learning how to trust myself.

As I look back now, I can see clearly how that much aloneness for that long isn’t good for anyone! I remember thinking that it had been weeks since anyone had given me a hug or even a high five. The friends I had at school were all gone for the summer, and I didn’t have close friends in class or at work, so I tried to fill my free time with activities that felt in alignment with my values, hopes, and ideals, without spending much money.

I remember making a giant poster-board collage and list that had the simplest of tasks on them to help me manage myself well — floss daily, drink lots of water, run on the greenway, and eventually, Farmers Market Saturday Mornings — each line item with a little empty box beside it to check upon completion.

There, tucked away on an unassuming hillside in Boone, was the weekly Watauga County Farmers’ Market. There was something about the incentive to get up with the sun, to bring my own bag and a little bit of cash I had set aside, that held a sense of hope and possibility. It held a sense of belonging to a place. It held a promise about the woman I was becoming but didn’t know how to be just yet.

I didn’t have much to spend but the reward for a week of classes and work was the crisp mountain morning air on my skin, a cup of steaming hot black coffee from the local coffee truck, and a bit of produce to enjoy in the days to come. If I had a little extra money, I snagged a freshly-made ham biscuit cooked up right before my eyes. Heaven!

The reward was also in the people-watching, and walking around to be a part of something — the culture of the mountain folk and what they wore, the crafts they made, and the things they grew. There were lots of granola-y people dressed in tie-dye, lots of brought-from-home pottery coffee mugs holding that yummy coffee, steam dancing up into the air as they chatted with neighbors. Clay jewelry and quirky characters. Live mountain music, with all its mandolins and banjos, coming awake with the summer morning sun.

The rhythm of going, the simple joy in being there, and the togetherness each Saturday morning was like a prayer to me. I remember thinking that it was like my church, my Sabbath. And I know God met me there. Seeing the natural beauty in the colors and shapes of things grown right out of the ground, things that held filling and nourishing for me, things that tasted good, was life-giving. A feast for my heart more than anything else, a balm for my soul.

I learned something those summers.

Sometimes life is hard and deals you weird hands. Sometimes you find yourself having to pick yourself up by your bootstraps and mutter “I can do this!” in between long stretches of time when you know first-hand how badly you do not know how to do this. Sometimes you make bad choices (like when I “borrowed” clothes from my retail job and tried to return them without anyone noticing) and you learn to deal with the consequences (getting fired from one of the best-paying college-kid jobs on the mountain.)

I learned how to be there kindly for myself. I noticed that I needed a hug and that I felt scared and vulnerable. I noticed that I needed some simple sacred habit, a time set aside to enjoy God in the midst of my difficult circumstances.

And I was, in fact, vulnerable. From weird jobs to hungry Mary Kay ladies, aggressive guys and strange date offers, I had to learn how to notice my discomfort and stick up for myself. I learned to honor my gut instincts that gave a hard no without understanding why, even though I was starved for friendship, belonging, and connection. Sometimes I didn’t honor them, and I got myself into a few pickles that thankfully, even when no one else was watching over me, God protected me through in the miracle ways He has since I was a very little girl.

I learned that to know a place you have to know its people. You have to know the land and what naturally grows there, and when. Knowing that rhubarb and asparagus and greens lead the way in the too-cold spring mornings, that strawberries come alive in the early summer and peppers round out in the full-grown heat, and it is all apples, squashes, and Christmas trees from there — it shows you what the people who grow things there know, and how the growing shapes the rhythm of their years and their relationship with the mountains.

It teaches you culture.

It teaches you how to enjoy the best of your land and your people. A perfectly ripe peach in July, not too early and too hard to bite. Instead of purchasing trucked-in produce from the grocery store, you could support your neighbor’s livelihood and enjoy the very best quality. You can keep coming back, you can learn names.

That little Watauga County Farmers’ Market healed me, little by little, Saturday morning after Saturday morning, in a time that I was so alone I could hear my own heart beating against the ticking clock, and hear my own thoughts on full blast, almost all of the time. It taught me to enjoy slow, to enjoy aloneness. and take care of myself. It taught me to enjoy the season even though it was a difficult one, and take the times to learn me.

To grab my little bag and scrape up dollars and coins, toss on a cardigan and enjoy an impossibly beautiful Blue Ridge sunrise and the foggy mountain dawn air, so cool against my skin, so kind like a friend. Cathedrals of stained-glass sky, communion of local produce and coffee and people.

Since then I’ve always sought out my local market, wherever I’ve lived or traveled. No matter how small or large, I’ve wanted to know what the people are dishing up, and incorporate that local-ness, that belonging, into my everyday life — a cucumber sliced with tomato over toasted bread here, a peach on salad greens tossed with feta there. Locally roasted coffee in Raleigh. Fresh challah bread in Tel Aviv. Grapes and flowers in Paris. Apples in Blowing Rock. Honey in Wake Forest.

Tell me, is there a time that some simple act or rhythm brought you healing in a hard time?

With love and fresh peaches,

Sam