Local Food...

I've been looking forward to this weekend all week. Much moreso than usual. I knew the forecast was going to be great. Also, I knew it was the first downtown tailgate market here in Asheville. We had only been once or twice last year. My Husband works Saturdays so it proves a bit difficult with two children to watch them, carry produce (or like today, little baby tomato plants), as well as really enjoy things and see all there is to offer. 

But this year I'm making a pledge to myself, I'm going to go every Saturday with the kids. I was actually interviewed today while I was there, about why we come to the tailgate market. You always think of your most eloquent responses once home. I should have said, "because aside from the politics around food, regardless of the economic benefit to my community, I want my kids to know this is normal. That meeting the people who grow your food is just our reality. I want it to be so normal for them that when they have families of their own they are either growing it for themselves or sourcing it locally and personally". 

Then driving home, I spy a produce/flower stand on the side of one of the main drags and knew I had

a couple bucks left that I had allotted for fun this week. I stopped and got a wonderful flat of pansies. I had yet to treat myself to annuals yet since living in our home beginning in 2007. These are old favorites. 

Once home, I planted flowers while the boys played outside HAPPILY together for over an hour. Then once inside we ate beautifully simple lunches full of good healthy food. They actually quibbled over who was going to eat their carrot the fastest. Then they were downstairs together HAPPILY, lol, playing once again for another hour while I cleaned the house, windows open and music playing. 

I finally just stopped. I could feel it in every fiber of my being, someplace so deep and sacred that rarely gets flooded with so much emotion. I am so blessed. So grateful. All I could think of was somehow writing a sonnet to the soil that I got to dig in today, or a poem for the beautiful happy faces of those pansies, for the sunshine at the market, for the amazingly crafted food we got to relish in, for my whole big house, for the coziness of it, for my husband working and all my immediate family being within 15 minutes of me now. But it was more than that even. It was gratitude at its deepest level for things that can not be summed up in words. Not expressed via blog. Except to say, I truly am thankful also that I am the type of person that took a moment today and just stood in abundant gratitude. Let it wash over and through me. To know the greatness of the Universe and that I'm the tiniest concern of it and yet feel somehow individually kissed by it. 

Thank You.