After a week of extracting and bottling the early summer honey (golden, champagne, delicious) I took Let it Bee to the Hastings Farmers Market yesterday. Some of you may know that I am not a natural at retail. It involves two of my weakest points: basic math, and friendly chit-chat. Not necessarily in that order. While I love going to the Farmers Market, seeing friends and neighbors I may not have seen for months, I come home afterwards and fall into a deep sleep, my fingers still sticky.
And yet, and yet.
There are always interesting discoveries. Yesterday I met Hastings own Chicken-Sitter. A lovely woman approached Let it Bee's table and asked if we kept chickens. (She is not the first to have asked that lately. I wonder why? Could it have something to do with the chicken on the cover of Absent a Miracle?) I said we did not, but would like to. She explained that she looks after chickens in Hastings when their owners go on vacation. This is a niche I did not realize existed, and yet clearly it is called for. I took down her name and email address, in anticipation of that happy day when we are collecting our own eggs and convincing Daisy and Bruno that they should suppress all their natural hunting instincts and not chase chickens. I do not anticipate success with the latter.
One of my favorite Farmers Market moments is this: inevitably, or at least at every time I've been so far, someone will come up to me and say, I'm allergic to honey. Yesterday it was a beautiful little girl who announced this fact and explained that she would get hives all over her body, and itch uncontrollably, if she ate honey. Sometime friends will feel compelled to tell me that they just don't like honey and never have; then I feel compelled to say, That's fine, not everyone likes honey, some people prefer refined sugar or corn fructose syrup, those environmentally depredatory products of pesticide-riddled monoculture that are the chief causes of the obesity epidemic in our children.
You can see why I am retail-challenged.
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3 comments:
I love the story about the chicken sitter at the Farmer's Market! And isn't it weird about people not liking honey...I doubt very few people in the Middle Ages were allergic to honey!
I've been looking to buy local honey! Will you be at the Hastings farmers market this coming Saturday (Aug 1)? And if so how early do you get there?
Thanks,
Pam
Pam, We won't at the market again for a while - email me (christine.lehner@gmail.com) and you can come by and get some if you like.
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