The Wisdom of the Radish

Author:Lynda Browning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2011-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

The heirloom Armenian cucumbers we grew and sold at the market couldn’t be found at an average grocery store.

So if certain farmers’ market produce is slightly more expensive than grocery store fare on a per-calorie basis, that’s because the cost reflects the effort of a diversified growing process. Grocery stores can afford to not make money on certain items because a sale brings in customers, and encourages them to spend more money on other profit-making items (particularly processed foods). If I took this approach, I would be working sixty to eighty hours a week for nothing.

Well, I guess I’d be working sixty to eighty hours a week for the privilege of squash rash, cracked fingers, stained hands, an achy back, and a bad tan. For too few showers, filthy fingernails, and torn pants and shirts.

I may have missed my five-year high school reunion, but I knew where my peers were. Business school, law school, med school; at banks and firms and start-ups in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. If you measure success in salaries, cars, and clothes, I am hardly elite; in fact, I lose handily. Stock options and IRAs aren’t part of my job description. I don’t own a suit. At the moment, I was living off of savings and the generosity of my boyfriend’s parents, hoping that some day two risks would pay off—the financial risk of starting up a farm business from scratch, and the far more terrifying risk that my first multiyear relationship could also be my last. That maybe, after four years of dating and three of living together, we would make it official—so that when customers searched for the right word to describe Emmett, I wouldn’t have to fill in with that all-too-shallow word “boyfriend” or the awkward “partner,” which may have had an appropriate denotation but connoted a strictly professional relationship, the presence of a cowboy, or the existence of a gay lover, none of which applied to us.

Instead, I remained the would-be farmer’s long-term girlfriend. And my odds for an imminent change of status didn’t seem good. Granted, we had, in private, told each other that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, but at some point the rest of the world needed to know this. Sure, we’d started to appear in one another’s family photos, and it was generally assumed that when we were invited to functions, our other half would be coming along for the ride. But words matter, and few are so public as husband and wife. There’s something about marriage that says: I choose you to be my family, I choose you to be my home. And there’s something about society that recognizes and even honors this choice despite all cynicism and pessimism to the contrary.

It pissed me off that I wanted to marry him. I was never the girl who dreamed of marrying the boy, and in fact I really never thought much about marriage—aside from a deeply rooted desire to avoid my parents’ disastrous version—until now.

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