Sunday at the Farmer’s Market
Once upon a long time ago, Helena wore low heels, but now even orthopedic sneakers don’t keep her feet from hurting hours before the end of a school day. She tracks children’s tears, vomit, spilt milk, loose teeth, and the frequency of peanut appearances in her nut-free kindergarten classroom.
These days, her kids look like fresh copies of the old Polaroids hanging on her “Math Facts” Wall of Fame. Sally C’s little girl looks so much like her mom that Helena never quite remembers her name and since she refuses to call students sweetie or honey, she didn’t call her anything at all for three weeks, which was the time it took to start making them practice penmanship by printing new name tags every day. Kindergarteners need all the practice they can get.
Retired, Helena could sit at this park bench and watch children play without worrying about arguments over plastic dinosaurs. (She’d worry. But, retired, Helena wouldn’t be responsible.) Instead of listening to endless iterations of how Sam caught the biggest fish ever or that Lulu’s pet tortoise almost died five times, she would be able to hear herself think.
She would hear herself think.
She would hear herself think.
A fly circles and threatens to land on Helena’s orange juice, but she waves it away, a lesson plan for insects and adjectives hatching in her mind. Flies: tenacious, unsuccessful and, ultimately, short-lived.
RSVP
If this town were bigger and the mail carriers didn’t know everyone’s name (and dog’s name and the possible name of their unborn children) and take pride in knowing what was in the mail from locals so they’d know an invitation when they saw it and be delighted that it was going through the system with a legitimate stamp instead of just being walked over, unaddressed, and tossed on a porch or delivered verbally at a run-in at the market because you can’t not run into people in a town where a family moving in or out would require numbers to be repainted on the city sign and an announcement to be made in the flyer that went out every week with local news that covered everything from how Timmy’s latest lost tooth got an extra five dollars from the tooth fairy to a request for nobody to plant squash this year because Ms. Bea had overdone her garden again and odds were squash would end up in the wedding dinner for the person you should have been brave enough to say yes to before an outsider came and swooped them away and everyone knows so even though you wish you didn’t have to go, there’s no way they’d believe you if you said the invitation never arrived.
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