I have been going to the same farmers' market on Saturday mornings for about four years now, since the spring after I moved up here. The market sets up in the parking lot of what used to be the Methodist church and is now a community space that I do not entirely understand the governance of. There are usually about fourteen vendors, give or take, depending on the season. A handful of vegetable stands, two bakers, a cheese person, a man who sells only mushrooms, two flower stands in summer, a honey vendor who is also a beekeeper at one of the apple orchards north of town, and the egg vendor.
The egg vendor's name is Roy. I did not know his name for the first two years I bought eggs from him because I was too embarrassed to ask after a certain amount of time had passed. He finally introduced himself when I asked about whether the brown eggs and the white eggs taste different, which is a question I had been working up to for an embarrassingly long time. They do not, he said. That is just the breed of chicken. I told him my name and we have been on a first-name basis ever since, though we still mostly just talk about eggs.
Why I keep going back
I do not actually know if Roy's eggs are better than the eggs at the grocery store. I am not in a position to make that judgment with any rigor. The eggs are a dollar more expensive per dozen than the grocery store eggs of similar provenance, and they are sometimes irregular in size, and once in a while one of them is so small it is almost decorative. I do not think the difference is large enough to justify a four-year habit on its own.
What I have come to understand is that I am not really buying eggs from Roy. I am buying about three minutes of a particular kind of conversation. He asks about my week, and I ask about the chickens, and he tells me which hens have started laying and which have stopped, and I tell him about something small that happened at the library, and the entire transaction takes the time it takes a person to count out twelve eggs into a recycled cardboard carton.
The three minutes are the entire point. I did not realize this for the first year. I thought I was being virtuous about local food. By the second year I had come to understand that what I was actually doing was protecting a small recurring conversation with a person whose voice I had learned the rhythm of, and who had learned mine, and that this was probably more important to me than the eggs.
The other vendors I have not built a relationship with
I have not built a similar relationship with most of the other vendors. I buy bread sometimes from the woman who runs the smaller of the two bakery stands, but she has staff turnover and I have never spoken to the same person twice in a row. The cheese person is friendly but the line is always long and there is no good moment for a real exchange. The mushroom man does not appear to want to talk and I respect that.
The honey vendor and I have a developing relationship that I am trying not to overstate. We have been on the edge of becoming on a first-name basis for several months now, and I think we will eventually get there but I am not going to force it. These things take the time they take.
What the egg vendor taught me about the rest of the week
The thing I have started to notice, partly because of Roy, is how many of my favorite small interactions are with people I do not really know but whose recurring presence in my week has come to matter to me in ways I would have a hard time defending in front of someone who wanted me to defend it.
There is the woman who works the register at the grocery store on weekday afternoons. There is the older man who walks his dog past my window at 7:42 every morning, with whom I have exchanged a wave maybe forty times in the last three years and to whom I have never spoken. There is the librarian at the branch in the next town over who once recommended a novel to me that ended up being the best thing I read that year. None of these are friendships. All of them, I have come to think, are something.
I do not have a name for the category. The category is something like: a person whose existence in your week constitutes a small, recurring, unspoken acknowledgement of being seen and remembered, without the obligations that come with friendship. I think most weeks I have eight or ten of these. I think they are most of what makes the week feel like a week and not just a sequence of obligations.
The dozen I bought today
This morning Roy had brown eggs and one carton of greenish-blue eggs from the two Easter Egger hens that came into the flock last year. I took the greenish-blue ones because they make me happy in a way that is completely irrational, since they will become exactly the same scrambled eggs I would have made with the brown ones. He said the white hen had stopped laying for the winter and he was not sure if she was going to start again or if this was retirement. I said I hoped retirement. He said either way she had earned it.
I walked home along the river road with the eggs in a tote bag. It took eleven minutes. The dog-walking man passed me going the other way and we waved. The greenish-blue eggs got home unbroken. That was Saturday morning, and I am going to do it again next week, and the week after, and probably for years, and I do not think there is anything more to it than that.
