market day

Every Friday, Gertha would get up before the sun, clutching the envelope of tattered bills I'd given her yesterday.  With about half the amount of her monthly salary in hand, she would head to town with a few large sacks and a printed list of fruits, vegetables, and pantry staples carefully marked and gone over in her purse.

Every Friday, Micheline would watch over the kids while I worked from 8-1, and not long after I got home, I'd hear the taxi pull in...Gertha was back from market.

Sweaty and dusty, she would drag the heavy bags from the car and haggle one last time with the driver, while Micheline and I would go out to greet her and help her carry everything in. 

Don't kiss me yet, I'm filthy! she'd say to the kids every single time. 

She would wash up and Micheline and I would usher her to the table to put up her feet and eat a late lunch after her long morning in the sun, arguing prices one item at a time...battling over (gourdes) pennies through pyramids of (zorang) oranges, crates of filthy (zé) eggs, sorting through muddy (cawot) carrots, picking through (zonion) onions and bruised (zaboka) avocados, pressuring the warm (ananas) pineapples and debating over tiny, filthy (pomdetè) potatoes. 

Gertha's work was largely through, and Micheline's just beginning.  Gertha would play with the babies, and Micheline and I would begin...filling the sinks with water and bleach, cutting the bags open and pulling at knots, scrubbing the mud off the beets, bleaching the bananas, the onions, the peppers (memories of heavy years of cholera devastation don't scrub away easy), washing the eggs and tossing the ones that quickly bobbed to the surface, too rotten even for the dogs, putting away the dented cans of tomato paste, the little fragile sacks of sugar, the tiny bundles of spices and herbs. 

Snapping bottoms and tops off bleached green beans. Washing the parsley green again. Packing away cookies for kids' lunches, draining the sinks, wiping out the mud, and filling them again for second washes of the muddiest carrots, beets and potatoes.  

Micheline would fill her skirt with bundles of tomatoes and sort them into the fridge, an appliance she has too...Phil's old one, long dead and empty, laying on its side in her yard to keep the rats in their home out of their spaghetti.  

She'd fill the totally empty drawers with now-ivory eggs, with long lime-green peppers, with enormous heads of cabbage and papery heads of garlic, and long after quitting time, late afternoon, Gertha and Micheline would kiss my cheeks and wish us all a good weekend with Jesus, and would head home together, chatting and weary and ready for the weekend.  

Matt would come home to a transformed kitchen...bowls of oranges in the corner, brown little sweet bananas piled under dishcloths, fridge full...enough food for all the many mouths for one week.  There was nothing in between, no stops at the store on the way home from work...the vibrant riches we now had would last 'till next Friday, no matter what.

Many a Friday, as I opened and closed cabinets, the three of us chatting about what Gertha saw in town and weekend plans of mostly laundry and children and church, I shook off the uncomfortable weight of the knowledge that Micheline's family, larger than mine, had NEVER had so much food at one time in their entire lives. Tried to distract from the knowledge that expensive fruits and vegetables were a luxury in both women's homes, not an expectation like it was in ours.  

This morning at first waking, I laid in bed eyes still closed and was just totally thumped with thirteen years of such Fridays.  Out of nowhere poured $85 dollars a week of food, of hours in the sun, weaving through women sitting in the dirt selling mangoes, mangoes, of negotiating, bargaining prices I never could have come close to had I done it myself. Of hours of scrubbing carrots with mud under our nails, of tediously picking tiny rocks, sticks, and shards of tiny glass out of the bags of beans, of Micheline singing praise songs over the miracle of running water she never had, of Gertha dramatically recounting stories of crooked vendors and pickpockets, of battling shoppers and rising prices and ornery taxi drivers, making Micheline and I laugh, and Lily giggle from the other room where she played and listened, always listened and played.

I know how much a pyramid of grapefruit goes for in the market in Cap-Haitian (and I know how much it'll cost Matt if he gets it instead on his way home from visiting a sick student), and I know how to pasteurize our Monday morning milk, after I've sifted out the grass.  I know the sound of Gertha's taxi, I feel the hot sun beating down lifting heavy bags between us, I know the feeling of being rich, rich-rich, with FOOD...Enough to feed every single one. Of three women, still taking hours of work together to make it happen.

This morning I came to the kitchen, and stood staring in my fridge to the bags of broccoli-kale salad, little containers of Greek yogurt, a gallon of milk, cold cans of LaCroix and sticks of string cheese and shiny celery, all the food it took me an air-conditioned store in English to buy from a gazillion choices...and twelve minutes to unpack.  So easy. So good. So clean. So quick. 

Why in the world would I wake up with that in my mind and dust in my nose and dirt in my nails and the sound of Gertha's voice in my kitchen, Micheline humming?  

And why does it all make me sad?