The farmer at my market heckled me today.
I’ve been buying produce, chickens, and one lovely duck that fed us for four meals, and whose fat is still in strips in our freezer for cooking, from this farmer on a weekly or semi-weekly basis since our neighbor first recommended him. The food is just good; I buy things I never used to eat and things I don’t even recognize, and then I cook and eat them and buy more.
And in all those weeks it’s been his coworker, a cheerful little woman in a dark-red pixie cut, who has deciphered my accent, explained the gaps in my knowledge, and patiently measured out handfuls of spinach so that I can say “when.” The farmer himself apparently dislikes this approach, as he balked on Tuesday at my request. “But for how many people?” he asked plaintively.
“I can just say ’stop,’” I encouraged, but he shook his head.
“But it depends; for how many people?”
“We’ll just eat it, all week.” However much there is, I’ll wash it and slice it up and add it to any old meal right near the end. I pour steaming broth over it for lunch; even Nick wilts it willingly these days. The farmer held up one bunch with an annoyed shrug, and I nodded. While he stuffed it into the weighing basket, I rifled through the pile and picked out three more bunches, small young ones with dark-green leaves, and held them out happily. Understanding comes slowly.
Anyway, Sunday night Juliette got sick. I mean, she got sick. She vomited increasingly disturbing and disgusting things throughout the course of the night, trembling and twisting back and forth in the down-times in a futile attempt to find a comfortable enough position to allow her to sleep. By the time the sun rose we were all exhausted (except for Jolie, who managed to sleep through most of the drama with the snore of the righteous). There were no more clean towels in the apartment, or paper towels, or disinfecting floor wipes, and we were grateful that Juliette had learned on the first try that we wanted her to run into the kitchen when she began to heave, because otherwise we might be out of carpet-cleaner by then, too.
When Nick left for work I moved our little slumber party into the living room, where I began writing my list. See, the more tired I get, the worse my French gets. I get tongue-tied, sloppy, lose vocabulary by the textbook chapter. And the events of the previous night were alarming enough that I wanted to make sure I was clear, so I wrote everything down: when, what, how much. Our startled vet gave her two shots and three prescriptions, and sent us back home, where Jolie was kind enough to condescend to nap with us, even though she made it quite clear that she’d rather we all go for a brisk run.
So I thought I had gotten enough sleep to be fine by this morning, but apparently I’m still in a deficit. Because when I got to the farmer’s stall–dragging, a little, didn’t get there until noon–and the two familiar, cheerful faces turned my way expectantly, I drew a total blank.
I knew I wanted carrots, but I doubt I could have said so in English, much less in French. It was “bunch” I was sticking on, but if I could have just managed “carrots” I’m pretty sure that he’d have figured out the gist. But I couldn’t. I was so stuck I couldn’t even think to point, because I’ve said “a bunch of carrots” every week for a good long while, and it didn’t seem possible that the words just weren’t coming into my head.
We finally got past the carrot hurdle, with a lot of sympathy and commiseration from both vendors, but I decided to play it safe for the next item. I chose a lovely, heavy zucchini and handed it to the farmer with nothing louder than a smile while I planned out “a mix of red and yellow onions” carefully in my head, but he wasn’t having it.
“What is this?” he asked smugly, holding it just slightly, tauntingly, above the weighing basket.
“Courgette,” I snapped, but it was hard to stay huffy when the two of them began cheering happily at my oh-so-basic grasp of the language. I explained about the sick dog and the sleepless night; the farmer agreed that he couldn’t speak French when he was tired, either. He then gave me an extended lesson on different types of squash (would’ve been shorter if I hadn’t confused the two small ones, or tried for a silent ninety seconds to remember the word for “pumpkin” while they both shouted “potiron!”–it’s “citrouille,” but when I finally remembered they informed me that those are the same thing), and then packed up my pears (no problem) and peppers (thirty-second blank) and sent me on my way.
I’m not cooking any of the new produce tonight, though. Instead I’m using the large bulb end of last week’s butternut squash to make soup in, because butternut squash makes me feel superior.
See, a few weeks ago, when I first saw the pile of happy winter squash on the farmer’s back table, I read the chalkboard over it curiously. “Potiron,” “potimarron,” “patisson,” “butternut”…huh? I read it twice, and then I asked for one: “Un butternut squash, s’il vous plaît.” The woman looked at me like I had three heads, and shook hers: no match in her mental database of “things Americans might mangle.”
I took a breath and tried again: “Un boot-airr-notte, s’il vous plaît.” And that time I got one. So there.