The sun will set in an hour. The country highway is clogged with new commuter traffic. We're in a ramshackle stadium of produce with its own dirt parking lot. An itinerant taco truck is fulfilling a few final orders on the far side of the lot. This stand sells fruits and vegetables, but these are free to anyone with heart and pocketknife enough to wreck their repose. It is a haphazard yet arresting offering; a universe of nakedness is incarnate in the quiet conflagration of peaches, half a nectarine, and part of a plum. We may know them, they say, but not as their pits have known them, not as the light, never the tree. The secret comes swift as sight. Beauty is the illusion of symmetry.
Ramon's hands do not know haste. They pull walnut meat from crumbling shells with a steady, humble grace. This morning they gathered a bucket of nuts from a scattering of walnut trees. In four hours the bucket will be empty, the box full, and Ramon's hands will throw feed to the chickens, gather some kale for dinner, and dirty the kitchen towels. Once these hands were orphaned, grubby on the streets of Guadalajara, then labored in the fields of others for pesos a day. They found work in the Capay Valley, learned to write English at night, and built an adobe brick house for Lucy, the woman in Mexico Ramon would marry. She sits beside him and helps him shell. Her hands serve us coffee, pour milk into a honey bear, and straighten Ramon's socks when he sits. Ramon's hands do not fear the sun. There is dirt under his fingernails. The dirt contests the light for Ramon's hands.
Tomatillo, you are not a tame fruit. You gamble still in the back alley dice game of intemperate Nature. Husk-tomato, dark lantern, companion to peppers, anarchist. The government of row crops has not yet documented you, science has not yet turned your profligacy against you by husbanding the largest of your seed until, generations later, your assimilated offspring would be as strangers to you, but no longer strange to us. Only the roadside grocer can attend your specific abundance, and offer strangers, neighbors, and friends the intimacy of your garden carousing. Here, you're a dusk purple common in Guatemala, fading into a dusty green at your edges. In the mouth you burst into a shadowy sweetness. May you forever keep the shaggy company of wild edibles, offering us no guarantees, but instead—the game!
Dwayne hand-lettered Laying Hens for Sale on a cardboard air-conditioner box and propped it alongside the road. We stopped to take a look at the hens; he'd captured them just this morning. The trick, he said, was to starve them for a day, then throw some feed into the cages. Even so, a couple hens remained at large, guarded by an irritable pewter gander named Shadow. The hens did not belong to Dwayne. He was the boarder and caretaker of the owner—a woman dying of Hepatitis C. Well, we said, we weren't really interested in the hens. We were searching the valley for a unique kind of life. He thought for a moment. Oh, he said, I've got some watercolors inside. Do you want to see them?
Three onions have fallen. No casserole shall keep them, no quiche caress them, in no butter shall they be sautéed. With the haste of an illegal circus fleeing an incorruptible sheriff, the agribusiness-run roadside stand fled. Casting aside its thin aluminum bones and the produce that was too heavy, too ripe, too rakishly scarred by the baron of the fields behind, its harvest is orphaned. But these three onions do not know that their errand goes unrun. They have obstinately rediscovered their original purpose. Hallelujah! Sunward!
(All images and text copyright 2005, 2006 by Scott Squire and/or William Emery. Use by express written permission only.)