The Child Is Gone
This is no business for the weak or the meek. It's a business that will rip your heart out and stomp it flat in a minute, and laugh while it walks away.
We're coming back from what was our best market in years, both financially and in the volume we put on the table. Customers were lined up three or four deep, and its a good thing I brought both my interns cause I needed them and more to handle the throngs. It was exhilarating and confidence building; it provided a deep satisfaction. It lasted from the time we looked at all the boxes we had stacked in the walk-in on Friday afternoon through the time we unloaded them all from the van Saturday morning right through to the end of market, when we neatly stacked all the empty boxes in the van and headed home.
But when you get right down to it, we really didn't have that much. No, we had what should have been an average amount, a fair but not too spectacular showing for early September. It was that we have had such piss poor offerings all year, and for the past few years, really, that made Saturday's offerings seem so abundant - for there was no real abundance in what we had.
It's been a tough few years of broken shoulders and burnt up tractors and inconceivable deer devastation that made this week's harvest glow, and that realization brings no satisfaction. It brings with it the thud you feel when your head snaps back on the floor after you've fallen all the way down and after you feel yourself begin to fall and after someone gives that rug a good hard yank.
I can still, if I want to, fool myself into thinking we really rocked it this week, and perhaps I will, after I settle down, but, at this point, our harvest this week only serves to amplify our short coming of the past few years. Perhaps it's either half full or half empty, or perhaps the whole full/empty dichotomy is a distraction. We want neither riches nor glory, just enough of a harvest that can be monetized into paid bills and repaired equipment and perhaps tucked away toward heating oil. We rarely get either, but we do get, on occasion, a glimpse of the possibilies. A distant ship's smoke on the horizon. A taste of what could be if everything was different.
We're coming back from what was our best market in years, both financially and in the volume we put on the table. Customers were lined up three or four deep, and its a good thing I brought both my interns cause I needed them and more to handle the throngs. It was exhilarating and confidence building; it provided a deep satisfaction. It lasted from the time we looked at all the boxes we had stacked in the walk-in on Friday afternoon through the time we unloaded them all from the van Saturday morning right through to the end of market, when we neatly stacked all the empty boxes in the van and headed home.
But when you get right down to it, we really didn't have that much. No, we had what should have been an average amount, a fair but not too spectacular showing for early September. It was that we have had such piss poor offerings all year, and for the past few years, really, that made Saturday's offerings seem so abundant - for there was no real abundance in what we had.
It's been a tough few years of broken shoulders and burnt up tractors and inconceivable deer devastation that made this week's harvest glow, and that realization brings no satisfaction. It brings with it the thud you feel when your head snaps back on the floor after you've fallen all the way down and after you feel yourself begin to fall and after someone gives that rug a good hard yank.
I can still, if I want to, fool myself into thinking we really rocked it this week, and perhaps I will, after I settle down, but, at this point, our harvest this week only serves to amplify our short coming of the past few years. Perhaps it's either half full or half empty, or perhaps the whole full/empty dichotomy is a distraction. We want neither riches nor glory, just enough of a harvest that can be monetized into paid bills and repaired equipment and perhaps tucked away toward heating oil. We rarely get either, but we do get, on occasion, a glimpse of the possibilies. A distant ship's smoke on the horizon. A taste of what could be if everything was different.
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