So, About Last Saturday's Market

It was probably the busiest one we've had so far.  Unfortunately, the Co-op wasn't there with their truckload of produce, which would have made the vendor side of it more opulent, but there were two others selling plants and one woman selling gorgeous bunches of kale and chard and bouquets of roses of great color.

The cottagers from other places (mostly Canadian, but I did talk to a few Americans who come up for small bits of the summer) were making a great presence (and were very generous in their support for the library: both with time talking about it and donations).  It was sunny and I remembered to bring a hat, although I forgot not to wear black pants and shirt. I met a guy from California who reads this blog (!) and a couple from Canada who remembered meeting me at a quilt show some years ago.   It was all friendly and easy and busy.  Indeed, the Friends of the Library sold enough books to restore one's belief that people read all the time and thus never watch TV or participate in the time sink called a computer.

I think (having participated in the Saturday Market over the past three years) that it has some chance for viability.  I wish it had more vendors but it's hard to sell things that cost more than a few dollars and we just don't have that many people producing enough excess produce to populate the tables.  Soon, plums and apples, but even that isn't enough variety.  If I could get my squirrel population to NOT bury all my walnuts the minute they ripen, I could offer green-shelled walnuts.  The thing is, I doubt if most people are any more interested than I am in dealing with the permanent brown-stained hands that walnut harvesting offers.  You have to give it to the squirrels on that ground: they're willing to do the messy work and as a result they get the walnuts.

So too the market: there's a certain amount of messy work that has to go into putting such an event together and we're pretty happy for the results.  We are, at the very least, doing a pretty good job of entertaining all the visitors given that on Saturday alone there was the the Market, a barbecue at the golf course, a concert at the church, and an outdoor movie at Brewster's.  Not to mention the shopping at the International Market where the shelves were pretty bare by the end of the weekend.  Happy summer.