Market Day

I love farmer’s markets.  I love the energy.  I love the drama.  I love the visuals — the flashes of color, the bunches and stacks, each elbowing the other for attention.

Byron Market

The markets represent so much — hope, entrepreneurial sprit, connectors between well-tended earth and and the product, between fruitfulness and purpose.  Seasonal variation, largess, the traditional and the brash new cultivars. There’s the mingling with others in the neighborhood and those in-the-know, with the vendors you recognize and who are glad to see you, too.  I plan my day around a market visit and plot out when I’ll entertain my friends with my get.

I try to get to a farmers market once a week wherever I am.  Some are strictly vegetable markets, some have fruit and eggs, fish and meat, some include Ugg boots and pottery and value-added products like jams and soaps, and some offer a stage for chefs in action.  I like the ones with a good balance.

I usually manage to organize my arrival at the market about 10:30 or 11 in the morning.  I’d arrive earlier if I could boost myself out of my favorite reading/writing chair before then, but that’s a real stretch.  Midmorning is far too late for the foodies, but I don’t mind the gleanings.  They’re pretty good too.  I may not get the choicest stuff, but I will get something wonderful — maybe several somethings wonderful.

On Thursday mornings in Byron Bay, I gather my bags and drive to the market grounds behind the Police Station.  I don’t see my friends as they’ve come early and gone. The booths line a dirt walkway, about a dozen on each side.  Each booth is kitted out, its shape and display a reflection of the vendor — a striped awning or a tasteful arrangement, heaped excess or deliberately spare.  The coffee booths have put out a few tables under the trees, and a long line of customers wait patiently in the sun for an espresso.

I have my favorite booths, and I head there first. First is the Bangalow Cheese Company that makes wonderful feta cubed in olive oil and some fabulous smelly washed-rind cheese.

Bangalow Cheese Company at the Byron Market

I like the brothers who sell beef and eggs, the avocado man and the tomato lady. I stop for olives and some fruit, and if the season is right, dried bananas and lychees.  Sadly, the people who smoked trout and salmon were forced out of business for a while, as the fish suppliers were ruined by the fires in Victoria.  I hope they’ve returned.  Their smoked fish is great in omelets, as antipasto and nibbles.

I have to leave for home when I can’t carry any more in the bags I’ve brought. I always have far too much for just one week.  That doesn’t stop me, however.  I love to share what I’ve found with friends over a glass on wine on the back deck.

In Sydney, we head for Fitzroy Gardens Organic Market.   Fitzroy is the transition point between the gritty Kings Cross and the tony Potts Point where Darlinghurst turns into Macleay Street.  We take two bags each.  I find it difficult to walk away without several types of cheese and some bush-herb scented olive oil, some exotic mushrooms grown in the old railway caves in Mittagong.  And some freshly baked hard-crust bread and several kinds of veggies.  We plot out dinner.

In order to keep up our strength, we order an eastern Mediterranean frittata that is a cross between a spanikopita and an omelet with spinach, mushrooms and feta.  I admit that the sound and armoa of something sizzling is a siren call, and I always swing by to take a peek at what’s on the grill.  The sizzle is visceral — the thought that there might be a roast goanna or a haunch of wooly mammoth on the fire resides somewhere in my forebrain.  “Must find the sizzle,” growls the atavistic part of me.  The recently-responsible slimming part of me begins a calorie count before I zero in on the location.

We take a number and wait for our frittata, tantalized by the clank of pans and hiss of the grill, by the aroma, by the teamwork of the frittata kitchen under its tent.  I think of my Australian Shepherd who harbors drool in his great huge lip-flaps and blows bubbles of delight while waiting for treats at the drive-through window at the bank.  Here, I struggle to keep my drool to myself, and watch the cooks, a spatula in each hand, push and scrape our frittata into shape.  Two forks, one huge frittata between us, we perch on the brick wall in the middle of the gardens and carefully share, bags at our feet.

Refreshed and re-energized, we step lightly down to Potts Point Liquor and Deli for olives and pate and a bottle of wine or two — a crisp white blend in the summer, a lush red in the winter.  A semillion/chardonnay blend for later in the day on the patio after the long trek home sounds perfect.

Metrio Cafe, Potts Point

On another day, we might investigate any of the delightful delis, restaurants, stores, and markets along Macleay Street in Potts Point, but today, loaded down as we are, we have just one more stop before the long hike home. I have to check in at my favorite Potts Point Bookshop to browse among delicacies for the brain.  Just one for now.

Ahead of me, like the rabbit before the greyhound, is how lovely the crisp white wine will taste with a slice of pate on a bit of fresh bread, perusing a new read.  And after a long walk in the sun lugging all our plunder, perhaps I’ll nap.  Just a small doze before dinner.  Peaceful.  Content.  Relaxed.  Refreshed inside and out.  At ease in Oz.

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For more information about:

– the Mushrooms of Mittagong, go to http://www.southernhighlands.net.au/index.pl?page=117

– the Fitzroy Organic Farmer’s Market and others in Sydney, go to http://www.you.com.au/market-sydney.htm

– Potts Point Liquor and Deli, their Thursday and Friday evening wine tastings and other delicacies, go to http://www.ferosgroup.com.au/pp_default.aspx

– the Byron Bay Farmers Market, go to http://www.byronfarmersmarket.com.au

– Metrio Cafe (our favorite in Potts Point — changing menu, great service, reasonably priced wines, great scene), Potts Point, go to http://urbanwalkabout.com/pottspoint/food/cafes/metrio/

Remnants

endless variation

We leave tell-tale remnants of ourselves here and there.  Some lie in bright heaps of sunlight and others drift to adhere like faux spiderwebs sold at Halloween.

I left a crabby remnant at the grocery store the other day. I couldn’t find what I was looking for in a new arrangement of health supplements that seems to suit the arrangers rather than the consumers.  One might mention old dogs and new tricks, but I still hold on to the tail of that crabby remnant, draping it more carefully over my supremely logical argument and tucking it in around my grumpiness.

Sometimes remnants are more graceful, however, more generous, and find residence in memory, expanding the soul beyond its previous confines.  A waft of perfumed air on a walk, when you have to stop and go back and lift your nose to try to find the wave of it again.  Ephemeral, yet deeply satisfying.  A gesture, a touch, an acknowledgement — quiet, quick, with lasting import.

If we are lucky in our remnants, they include the explosion of belly-laugh, or a worldview that refuses to take the day-to-day plodding too seriously, finding tiny amusements to freshen the moment and lift the spirit.  Revisiting these remnants of grace sweeten and settle, softening the form of the day.

I gather my remnants and hold them close to me — savoring, sorting, making middens of these and those.  Over there, a heap of situations I’d rather forget — the ones that reappear uninvited and stick in gray patches to the edges of insecurities.  And there, the moments of delight, a far bigger pile, that I can sort through gratefully, relishing and wrapping them around myself like a perfumed silken shawl.

There’s a rainy-day pile too, for that 32nd-rainy-day-in-a-row, the pile of small pleasures that keep you from leaping out of your skin and dancing over the horizon.  And on the occasion of rare delight, they accompany me as I leap and dance away.

shell remnants

On my patio in Australia, under the corrugated metal awning, on a rusting Moroccan table lie my shell-remnants, gathered over the years on my afternoon walks at on the beach.  Rarely does the sea offer up the whole, but rather the fascinating bits — inner twist, fluted edge, striped arch.  Sensuous curves and spines that invite the finger-tip and call to the palm.

Tiny spiders have taken up residence under the limpets, and I reorganize their efforts as I examine, and sort, and fondle.  The same bits are endlessly fascinating.  Some with shiny nacre inside and others with keyholes on top.  This kind from Tallow, that from Lennox, or Main Beach or Belongil or Brunswick Heads.  The wind rearranges as the sea once did, and so do I.

On a Saturday morning, I move a few bits of shell to make room for my tea and a few small squares of dark chocolate.  I settle into the leisure of the Sydney Morning Herald and the weekend Australian, lounging in the air heavy with frangipani.  I lift my cup for a sip of the aromatic Jade Oolong and breathe deeply.  I’m drawn again to examine the shells at my side, wrapped in my own sweet remnants, piled and draped in bright heaps of sunlight, even in the shade.