[Fiction] How to Make Enemies at the Farmers Market
Read the second-place entry for our week of June 1 contest, Moments of Being
How to Make Enemies at the Farmers Market
by
When smoke settles thickly in the valley, don’t let yourself dream of wind or rain.
Wind feeds fires. Summer storms dance across dry fields in flashes of lightning. Dream of stagnant air.
Sweep ash from the hood of your car each morning.
Watch a red disk sink behind the hills each evening.
Squeeze drops into your eyes throughout the day. Rinse. Repeat.
Tell yourself you’re lucky. The fires are far.
Tell yourself you’re lucky. Your children aren’t fighting them.
Make a checklist. Passports, birth certificates, social security cards. Photos, only some of them. Clothes, only what you need. Refresh the news every hour.
Wait for the evacuation.
When it doesn’t come, try to unclench your jaw. Why others and not you?
Send clothes and donate money. Read about invasive plants and budget cuts. Talk about what needs to change.
Suddenly, forget. Change your clocks. Swap your shorts for sweaters and rake leaves. Marvel at an endless blue sky. Leave dark footprints in stiff grass, and let the frost burn your toes. It’s the nature of fires to dwindle; let them.
Snow falls thickly in the mountains. In between talk of powder days and school closures, worry quickly about cheatgrass. How it will thrive later, greedily sucking up snow runoff come spring. Make hot cocoa.
Let the clear, spring sun warm you. Open your windows to let the fresh air in. Go to the farmers market on Saturdays to buy peonies for the table.
Drive into the mountains and set up tents with friends. Cook dinner over a well fed fire. Talk about the meal you’ll make tomorrow, when you return from the woods with bags full of morel mushrooms.
Drown the fire. Go to sleep.
You’re the only one who has never hunted morels before, so let your friends give you a crash course in the morning. Learn that morels can’t be mass farmed; they’re too particular. They need moisture, southern facing slopes, and decaying logs. They thrive after burns.
They’re hard to spot, your friends warn you. But once you see one, they’ll be everywhere.
Work methodically. Bushwhack your way past towering, blackened trunks. Run your hands along their spines, feeling where wood curled and sap bubbled last summer. Their smoke is still somewhere in your lungs.
You strain your eyes, scoot leaves with your toes. Every time you think you see a pale, honeycombed finger poking out of the grass, it’s a singed pinecone, a clump of dirt, a speckled puddle of sunlight.
Sit on a log.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Feel it all.
Let the breeze brush your skin and understand that hope doesn’t rise from the ashes like a Phoenix, demanding attention. It spreads slowly under what has been lost, revealing itself only to those with the patience to find it.
Beside you, find your first morel.
At the market next weekend, watch a man hold a pale lump up to the sunlight. He scoffs.
$70 per pound? No way a few mushrooms are worth that.
A Note From Our Guest Judge, Hannah Stuart-Leach
I love how this meditation on climate anxiety, with its experimental form, unfolds slowly through the seasons. From darkness, gradually to a glimmer of light. I also found it incredibly moving the way the close attention to sensory detail (very Woolfian), culminates in the quietly hopeful symbol of the morel.
About
Katie Bird is a middle child, a ginger and a double Cancer with a Pisces moon. In other words, she has a lot of feelings and loves to talk about them. She writes emotional essays and performs stand up comedy. You can find her on Substack at katielotz.substack.com.
This piece was written in response to the prompt Moments of Being.
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I love how to understand the title you need to wait to the last bit. It’s a full circle moment.
"Let the breeze brush your skin and understand that hope doesn’t rise from the ashes like a Phoenix, demanding attention. It spreads slowly under what has been lost, revealing itself only to those with the patience to find it." - Wow, this is beautiful.