The Orchard & the Vegetable Stand: A Memory

“Here in the familiar countryside with my parents, my two younger brothers, my friend Richard almost exactly my age, the apple orchard, the old house whose upstairs bedrooms all led one into the other, and had beds so high I had to use a stool to climb into my own—with the kitchen floor that tilted at an angle towards the old stable door—here I felt secure and happy. I could climb an apple tree and hide for hours and nobody would care. We kids could squat in the dirt by the driveway building little ranch houses out of sticks and rocks, or run around the yard in endless games of Capture the Flag. But nobody had invaded the space where I actually lived and was sovereign.”—Anita Sullivan

The Highest Cauldron 

By Anita Sullivan

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—3/7/2016—It simply doesn’t matter that we pass great portions of our waking lives like our fellow animals, mindlessly blinking and breathing; that entire days could be superimposed and we would never notice. The variety is taking place at the molecular level. This level is scarcely touched by either memory or words.

Just once, though, I would like to sneak up on a single hour from my past—as it is happening —and pay more attention this time around. So, here goes!

An August afternoon in front of a white, two-story farmhouse in Leominster, Massachusetts. I was about eight years old. Inside a few hours, I bumped gently out of deep childhood.

Two mothers and two fathers, likely out of equal parts wisdom and laziness, pronounced their two children ready to sit alone together at the farm’s produce stand in front of the house and sell vegetables.

What we did not know and were not told was that this farm stand normally operated on the honor system; it did not require an attendant. In other words, we could not actually screw anything up.

Our parents, immersed in their idea of a “teaching moment,” assured us that our job would be exciting and fun, yet also very important, because for once we would actually be discharging an adult responsibility.  And, oh yes, we would be paid by the hour.

And, oh yes, [subtext] we had no choice in the matter.

And, oh yes [minor detail] what means “responsibility”? This was a concept completely unknown to me. I only knew good and bad; I only knew behavior allowed and not allowed. This was a major flaw in the experiment—that my view of the world was narrow and deep, like that of a deer or an owl.

Richard and I were led out, like lambs to the slaughter, into the low building open on three sides, with a few rows of wooden troughs down the middle, around the perimeter. Here, the tomatoes tumbling out of a bushel basket onto a piece of burlap; there a heap of green beans; potatoes farther back out of the pale orange haze of the early afternoon. Price tags poking up from each different heap, impossible to miss.

I was terrified. At that age, everything I didn’t make up myself terrified me. Here in the familiar countryside with my parents, my two younger brothers, my friend Richard almost exactly my age, the apple orchard, the old house whose upstairs bedrooms all led one into the other, and had beds so high I had to use a stool to climb into my own—with the kitchen floor that tilted at an angle towards the old stable door—here I felt secure and happy. I could climb an apple tree and hide for hours and nobody would care. We kids could squat in the dirt by the driveway building little ranch houses out of sticks and rocks, or run around the yard in endless games of Capture the Flag. But nobody had invaded the space where I actually lived and was sovereign. Until today.

Richard was with me, and he didn’t seem to be scared. Maybe he understood what was going on. But I had no idea what the grown-ups were talking about when they patiently explained how to read the numbers on the scale, to write down these numbers on a piece of paper, and using our skills in  grammar school arithmetic, to multiply the weight by the price—and ask a stranger to pay. I didn’t even understand enough to ask any questions.

Somehow, deep inside, I knew in advance I would fail my parents during the long afternoon that stretched ahead. They had no idea how confused I was. I might as well have been a cardboard box sitting on the bench in front of the vegetable bins. My mouth was dry; I had forgotten how to speak.

My parents had not realized that I needed to be told the secret code of vegetable selling. For me, that was the only way I could understand anything—for it to be translated into the language that corresponded to my secret world. Otherwise I stood there in the dust of corn husk, strewn hay, in the bewildering green hierarchy of carrots, squashes, and crucifers, of lettuces and cucumbers—as if I were a marionette with all her ropes tangled in the empty rafters.

Fortunately, Richard did not share my inability to see any relationship between a cabbage and a handful of coins. The afternoon turned him from a generic boy into some kind of mythical shopkeeper, prowling the shelves, rearranging the vegetables in their small bins, squinting out at the dirt road from under his straw hat. He completely took over the whole operation, including a little patter of “sales talk” he would bring out whenever some hapless customer climbed out of the car and wandered into his sphere of influence. There was no way on earth I was going to be allowed to debase the operation by actually carrying out a transaction.

Did this give me relief? Did I revert to type and head for the apple orchard? Of course not! I remained responsible and useless to the very end of the afternoon. I loitered, I watched vegetables disappear and money enter the coffee can, and understood nothing thereby. For me, the afternoon was newly charged with drama every time somebody strolled up and began to squint at the produce. And every time, I failed to step up and submit to the test.

However, [law of unintended consequences] although I failed to follow through with my first adult responsibility, the experience didn’t leave me bowed down by a permanent sense of failure. Quite the contrary.

Because it wasn’t that my eight-year-old self was afraid of what other people knew (counting money, the value of vegetables) that I didn’t know: it was the opposite. For the first time, I began to realize that what I know can’t be easily or prematurely transferred into the larger world. If I try to talk to other people directly from inside my own private self, it will make people mad or confused. And what I realized back on that long-ago afternoon, and what I continue to be reminded every day since, is that other people are hiding things, just as I am. But these hidden things are exactly what we most urgently need to learn. Maybe they’re the only things worth teaching.

That afternoon in the dust and shadow of the small vegetable stand by the road where hardly any cars came by, I failed my first test. But I also tasted New England rural outdoors for the first time clearly on my tongue; I began to learn about disjunction, that it’s deeply possible in the still nature of things, with no fault involved.  And I began to desire finding a better match between my own molecules and those making up the events and things around me.

To order Anita Sullivan’s book, Ikaria: A Love Odyssey on a Greek Island, click on the book cover below.