Church of the Blessed Farmers Market

  Every farmer’s market has its day.
  In Takoma Park, Sunday market is a landmark, if a weekly event can be a landmark. It’s where everyone goes to run into one another, catch up on the news of the week, and incidentally buy apples and peaches and strawberries, depending on the season – sort of like church, but vegetables and fruit replace the prayers.
  Certainly the food is worthy of reverence. This market has the best selection of greens I’ve ever seen: collards, mustard, spinach, kale, bok choi, chard. There’s an entire town block dedicated to locally grown, mostly organic vegetables and herbs, sustainably raised bison, artisanal goat cheese, my favorite scones, big, fat empanadas, and eggs that go for $5 a dozen. Yes, some of it’s on the pricey side, but we are paying the farmers directly, talking to them about how this year’s crop of spinach has been and when we should all plant broccoli. It’s the sort of place where the farmers write memoirs (this Sunday, Forrest Pritchard from Smith Meadows Farm, will be signing his). And it’s where you’ll see your neighbors not only purchasing produce, but also pitching in behind the “counter,” working part-time as clerks for the farmers. I faithfully buy apples and peaches from Twin Springs FruitFarm, where my then-teenage son worked for several summers in a row, and the regulars there often ask for updates on his travels.
  Plus, there’s live music: the teenage fiddle player (I remember her from my daughter’s gymnastics classes) and the Banjo Man, with his crowds of young children chiming in on Oh Susanna.
  On Wednesdays – when many churches schedule evening mass – I can replenish the produce drawer at the Crossroads Market, where there is an entirely different congregation. For one thing, many of the patrons and vendors speak Spanish, so I get to trot out my rudimentary español: “dos pepinos, por favor, y un cantalupo pequeño.” In fact, with the smell of fresh pupusas sizzling on the griddle and the produce labels written in both Spanish and English, I can imagine that I am visiting some bustling town in Central America. The market has also gained a pioneering reputation for the first Fresh Checks program in the country: It allows families participating in federal food assistance programs like WIC and SNAP to use their benefits to purchase locally grown produce at discount prices.
   I also love the African griot/musician, who shows up from time to time to play his ngoni, a sort of skinny guitar  from Mali. Plus, there are Sno-Kones!
  But no rhubarb. For that, there is a Saturday farm stand that just opened this year on Maple Avenue. Called MarVa Harvest, it’s located right in the middle of a corridor of high-rise apartment buildings, just a couple of white tents erected in a parking lot to shade tables of produce grown primarily on one local farm. This market has a mission, which its prices reflect: to provide lower cost, sustainably grown food to everyone, regardless of income.
  The first time I visited, I saw the rhubarb I’d been looking for – it has such a short season, and I hadn’t seen it available anywhere else. The folks who run this market are polite enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, but I’m sure they were puzzled by my over-reaction when, halfway across the parking lot, I was already exclaiming, "Wow, rhubarb!" I was so excited to see it, I bought extra so I could freeze some for later. And I made one of the best strawberry rhubarb pies ever – my favorite, next to cherry. And mixed berry. And that lemon slice pie I want to try next.  
  Like farmers markets, pie has endless varieties. I love them all. Any day of the week.

Art for fun

Art Hop:
Excuse for artists and friends to roam around town for two days and look at each other’s work.
Opportunity to participate in no-pressure pop-ins, to see art you don’t have to buy (but can), then move on.
Showcase for Takoma Park’s artsy fartsy-ness, saturating everything from the hardware store to the toy shop.
All of the above.

And, this year, there’s an infusion of new talent. I’ll  not only get to rub elbows with the uber hipsters (and friends) who have anchored this town’s art scene for decades, I get to hang with some younger talent as well. Like Martin Swift.

He is seriously talented.

Full disclosure: he calls me Mom (as in, he visits my own kids enough to feel like a part of the family), so yeah, I would say he’s talented. But also, it’s true. This is not your average, just-out-of-college kid dipping his toes in the water and showing his “art” at non-juried, come-one-come-all shows. This is serious stuff, and this is a bold guy, unafraid of putting his (very distinctive) work out there on its own merit – not because it fits a particular genre or market, but because it’s who he is and what he has to say. Plus, it’s selling.

You’ll just have to see it for yourself, at Trohv, during Art Hop.

Which, even without Martin, is one awesome event. I mean really, what other city of 17,000 has the collection of talent we have? Sure, some of it is whimsical and crafty, but I would dare to say (since I’m not an art critic, but cleave to the old trope, “I know what I like”) much of it is high-end whimsical. You will not find plastic beads strung on earring wires. But there will be handmade beads, glass-fired beads, and an enthusiastic explanation of how they were made from an artist standing yes, right there, hoping you might dish out $30 for a pair of earrings. And even if you can’t really afford to, you probably will. Plus, there are other artists who have not quit their day jobs; their price tags are lower. And. You don’t have to buy anything. You can just come and enjoy the art, right where it is, and feel enriched because you live in this place where artists thrive.

The vibe here is open and unpretentious, the artists mostly have fun visiting with friends and each other, and if there are art patrons, you wouldn’t be able to tell them from the rest of the crowd. It’s basically a party, that happens to have art as a running theme.

The official Art Hop spiel goes like this: more than 60 emerging and established artists, variety of media (painting, textiles, photography, collage, hand-crafted jewelry), in shops, galleries and restaurants all around town. So, you’ll see collage at the hair studio and sculpture at the florist.  Saturday and Sunday, April 13 and 14 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Plus, there’s a kick-off tonight, Friday the 12^th from 6 to 8 at Trohv. Martin will be there.

And so will I.

The photo: Artist Bobbi Kittner, who helped found Art Hop, Bulent Ceylon who runs the shop, Covered Market, and John McQuillan, who runs Salon Jam hair studio. Photo by Sam Kittner

Warmth of community

Yesterday, one of the first warm days of spring, there were signs of the season everywhere in Sligo Creek Park. Brilliant yellow flowers carpeting the banks of the creek. Mallards paired up in the water. And my favorite, a pair of socks had been left behind, spread out on a rock where a boy must have liberated his toes and switched to barefoot for the summer.

On these gloriously warm days, people come out again. It is as if we are sparkling water, bottled up all winter long, until we unscrew our caps and the effervescence of our lives explodes.  There are more runners. More bikers. More gardeners and dog walkers and grillers.

And we talk more. We want to catch up with our neighbors.

I’ve found the perfect spot for this: at the new gelato store, kitty korner from the town clock. At about 5:00, the commuters begin walking home from Metro, and the young mamas are still out with their strollers. The merchants are around, too. Everyone is out, eating gelato, or drinking coffee, or popping into the hardware store, greeting one another, lightened by the warm weather and each other.

Yesterday I caught up with Dave, who I haven’t seen in six years. And Jane, who lives just down the street but with whom I haven’t shared a conversation in months. We sat in the sun and greeted people going by and chatted about our kids and our work and the new businesses in town.

Even strangers greet one another. Back in the park, one of the dog-walking regulars – an older guy with white stubble and two labs, one black and one white – leaned over the fence at the playground and called out, “How’s the new slide?” The young mama answered over her baby’s wailing, “We’re about to find out!” and looked up to find her toddler negotiating the top of the slide.

I have an old card posted on my refrigerator: “How to Build Community.” It’s a vintage sentiment but it still rings true. It is the unwritten code of Takoma Park.

Leave your house. Know your neighbors. Greet people. Sit on your stoop. Plant flowers. Share what you have. Help a lost dog. Take children to the park. Have potlucks.

 I am going to a potluck now. At my neighbor’s house. I will probably visit with another neighbor on the way.

And it’s not just because it’s spring – but that helps.

 

The photo is Marcello Minna, the very friendly Italian who runs our new gelato shop, Dolci Gelati. Building community.

Agricultural revolution

On a recent morning, as I walked my dog around the block, she lunged at something just out of my sight, on the other side of a neighbor’s car. Probably a cat, I thought.

No. A chicken.

Two chickens, in fact.

And I live in Takoma Park, a Washington, D.C. suburb within walking distance of a subway stop into the city.

The chickens did their high-stepping waddle around the back of the car, scolding the dog in their gentle clucking voices as they went. The dog, utterly confused, and, thank goodness, on a leash, alternately lunged and backed off. 

I know these chickens. They belong to a friend who lives across the street from where they were pecking at the neighbor’s lawn. They are out during the day, but mostly stay close to the coop and are gathered in at night. I thought of knocking on the door to let my friends know “the girls” had wandered across the street, but then they started to cross on their own. In front of a car.

Oh, no! I put out a mittened hand to alert the driver, who stopped to let the birds cross.

At this point I was laughing at these busybody hens bustling themselves home after their morning adventure, oblivious to automobile traffic and focused only on the patch of ground in front of them. The driver, unbelievably, was not amused, and acted as though she was waiting for a child to cross the street, nothing unusual about two chickens in her path. She continued her conversation on the cell phone and never made eye contact with me, or the chickens. 

I chuckled all the way home.

Then I toasted some cornbread for breakfast and slathered it with honey from the hives of another neighbor, across the street.

Who says you have to live on a farm to have the best of everything? 

 

A whelk to remember

New York Times, food section article: Elaborate photos of a little seashell-encased delicacy served beside a ramekin of unnaturally bright green parsley and garlic butter, with a glass of white wine in the soft-focus background. International overtones: the Italians call them scungilli, the English have popularized them as whelks – along with talk of executive chefs and lists of high-end-sounding restaurants that serve them mixed with “crispy duck tongues,” or dressed with “fenugreek-cashew pesto.”
Really?
These are the same little seashells I picked up on the beach when I was a kid, excited to be gathering up something we’d be eating for dinner that night, far from the linen-covered tables of Manhattan.
As I remember it, the whelk is a humble little critter, in the way a dragonfly is humble: common, in its habitat, but stunningly and intricately beautiful when you take time to really look at it. The whelks I encountered all those years ago were a study in black and white, like a houndstooth tweed whorled around a spiral snail house.

I don’t remember exactly how we ate the whelks – probably steamed until we could ease them out of their shells, and dipped in butter, if we had it. We were living aboard the Glad Tidings, a 40-foot sailboat that was home for a family of five (sorry, Jean, you’d disembarked by this time), and on this particular occasion we were in Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands. One expanse of coastline, called the Baths, is all rock, great for 9-year-old girls like me: I climbed and scrambled and explored, discovering the dips and recesses in the rock where centuries of crashing waves had worn the granite into smooth recesses, now filled with seawater warming in the sun. These still pools were full of tiny fish and shellfish, the sort that are perfect for filling small pockets. And they were full of whelks.

Our guide, Cap’n Tony, a boisterous, dark-bearded sailor and ex-pat we’d met at the dock a few islands back, told us the whelks were edible. Full of 9-year-old purpose, I began to collect them.
I kept one of the shells for years, proud to know the provenance of such a thing – but aside from that keepsake, I’ve never encountered whelks since. Until the New York Times.
In typical fashion – it’s what I love about this publication – the Times is thorough: I read that whelks are closely related to conch, the other Caribbean shellfish we learned to eat on the boat (we would follow their trails in the sand, visible through gin-clear water, then dive down for them). Whelks are usually sold as scungilli, often for Italian pasta sauces, and they are a by-catch (like the rock shrimp and stone crab my dad used to get in his shrimp nets, years later in Florida).
All good information. But the most important thing to remember about whelks, for me: that magical day I spent gathering them from the rocks, under a Caribbean sun.

Winter jam

This town knows how to do winter.
We do not slouch around in our pajamas all day, mourning the light and warmer weather of other seasons. No. We make an effort.
One recent weekend, I met with friends to celebrate three birthdays at Takoma Park’s OliveLounge. We had so much fun we decided to make it a weekly gathering. And we went again this past Friday. I saw two other friends there and the outing turned into dinner. What a great place to hang out! I always see neighbors, the wait staff is good-looking and attentive, and they let us hold a table until all in our birthday party had arrived. But mostly, it’s the gathering of friends that makes this place work.
Some of the folks who gathered this past Friday went on to hear some music two blocks away, at the Carroll Cafe. Another group went to Restaurant Week in Washington, one of the perks of living so close to the city’s border: during slow months (like February) some of the more expensive restaurants give a deal for a week, fixed price for three courses at lunch or dinner. I’d done the same thing for lunch earlier in the week. Yum.
On another weekend, I missed a writer’s meeting in order to get some housework done –but I could also have met my new neighbors, who had an open house to get to know the folks who live around them. The Takoma Park Jazz Fest sponsored its annual Jazz Brawl, for musicians to compete for a spot at the June festival. And on a Thursday night, a blues band was playing at El Golfo, a Mexican restaurant just over the Takoma Park line in Silver Spring. Midwinter Play Day was also that Thursday, with board games, yoga, dress-up, live music and more for kids and adults at the Takoma Park Community Center.
I did get to my hairdressers, Salon Jam, for a Valentine’s Day Art open house, where I saw my friend (and artist) Bobbi Kittner and met a couple artists I didn’t know before. The housewares store, Trohv, had a pop-up coffee shop the same day, with luxurious-sounding coffees described as if they were fine wines – and while "almond and sage aromatics, full body and cherry acidity" isn't everyone's cuppa, I loved sipping along with my friend.
The list goes on: yoga classes at the fabulous Willow Street Yoga; dance performances and classes at the Dance Exchange, and in nearby Brookland at the Dance Place; local bands at the VFW-HellsBottom, where anyone can pull up a stool for $1.75 beer; house concerts a block from my home; community center concerts with international musicians as well as local (in a Community Center that feels less municipal than professional, with new sound and lights for the stage); art shows and openings, also at the community center; everybody-sings events through Carpe Diem, a local ad hoc chorus; weekly open drum circles at the Electric Maid.
The problem with winter is not so much the hibernation that draws us all in – the problem is all this effort to overcome the urge to withdraw is packing our calendars so that the occasional evening cuddled by the fire becomes the exception. Which is not really a problem, after all.
Photo is from the house concerts I mentioned -- and it's by Sam Kittner, yes, Bobbi Kittner's husband. Thanks!

 

Fashion after 50

Skinny jeans are everywhere, in bright colors, like fistfuls of pick-up-sticks with legs in them. Cheery. Fun. Great with boots and bulky sweaters.

I want some.

But my mother’s voice sounds a warning: “teenage grandmother,” she’d say, rolling her eyes when we’d pass a woman (and there were lots of these in Florida) dressed in clothes my mother thought would be far more appropriate on a girl one quarter the woman’s age.

I am not my mother.

So I take a look at my favorite shop (the one with “thrift” in the name), and find two pairs of skinny jeans in what I think are my size. One pair is blue denim, the other black – disappointing, as what I really want are the crayon-colored legs I see in the magazines, but I don’t want to go on a full-out shopping spree, so I settle.

These are pretty ridiculous pants. I have to point my toes to get into them, then pull them up as if they are tights. You could tear a fingernail doing this—even a short one, like mine. Then I have to inch them up my legs. This reminds me of the girls in high school (not me) who would lie down on the dressing room floor to zip up pants they had no business wearing. I was so disdainful of that sort of thing. Fashion. Puh.

I begin to wonder if these skinny jeans are worth the trouble, and whether they’ll look like “they’re painted on,” another of mom’s favorite put-downs, once I have them on over my, well, healthy thighs. Yes, me and Beyonce. I have to tug to get them over my rear end. And then there’s a little adjusting of curves before I’m entirely comfortable.

But once they’re on: they look good. They feel fine. I like them. My boots go over them without looking like I’m trying too hard, with jeans tucked into my boots, as if to say, “look at my boots!” I check for muffin tops: sigh of relief. It is a little dicey if I squat down to pick something up – these particular skinny jeans could be higher-waisted and that would be good – but other than that, they’re great.

The second pair doesn’t fare as well. They’re also skin-tight, in a good way, but only up to the knees. Then there’s a lot of extra fabric and a funny gap at the top in the back. Plus, the fabric feels chintzy. They remind me of the jeans your mother wants you to buy – usually Wrangler, as I recall – that are just not cool at all, but you can’t explain how they are uncool. Something about the stitching, or the cut, something invisible, only to be felt.

Still, I have one pair of skinny jeans. I feel like I’m 20 again.

Mom, that’s not a teenager. Plus, I actually own a pair or Wranglers. And I like those, too.