This is strawberry season, that shimmering time for shortcake and jam. So my wife, Kathy, and I were at the farmers’ market bright and early Saturday, eager to get a flat of delicious Michigan berries.
As I handed over the money, Katherine said, “Thought you should know that this is the last time you’ll see me.”
“The last time? Never again at the market? How very sad!”
“Well, the time has come to pack it up.”
We shook hands.
We’ve been getting great produce from Katherine for years and years. She always had the best asparagus in May, the best strawberries – dark, dark red and perfectly ripe – in June, and the best corn in early September. In between, there were Bush Basil plants, smoldering in their sharp smell, and occasionally big dark red Hungarian peppers. Her husband used to join her, a big, white-haired guy, with a magnificent mustache, waxed and swirling upward.
He quit coming to the market several years ago; I only learned later he had kidney problems and was in dialysis.
Recently, her daughter joined her, and sometimes her granddaughter, working her way through the math of making change in real time in front of a bunch of strangers.
He quit coming to the market several years ago; I only learned later he had kidney problems and was in dialysis.
Recently, her daughter joined her, and sometimes her granddaughter, working her way through the math of making change in real time in front of a bunch of strangers.
That’s a tough early learning curve!
Katherine is tall and handsome, with high cheekbones and a full head of iron-gray hair. Her hands look as though they’d done it all, which they have: Sowed, weeded, picked, packed. And she always had a warm smile, welcoming and direct over the years.
On the way home, I started musing about Katherine and how she typifies Michigan today. Her husband used to have a pretty good white-collar job. But that went away, and he started helping out with the produce until he couldn’t do it any more. Katherine told me that it got tougher and tougher to handle all the stoop labor, especially with the strawberries. “I used to get local kids to do it, but it’s too much work for them these days.”
So day in, day out, she’s been at the market, Saturdays and Wednesdays, regular as clockwork. Always friendly, but in a dignified way. Always interested in what people did with her wonderful produce. Occasionally, she would bring a recipe to market.
Plainly, she knew her way around the kitchen, which probably explains why she was so fanatical about quality. Great cooking begins and ends with the quality of the ingredients.
In short, what Katherine and her family did for years is work out ways to survive. But survive in a way that mixed dignity with great pride in what she did. Her prices were a little higher than most of the other folks at the market. When I asked about it, she had a little smile: “Well, I’ve always thought you get what you pay for.”
That shut me up, and most of the other customers too.
Katherine strikes me as an icon for what Michigan people are doing in this time of troubles. Doing what’s necessary to survive, with dignity and pride. No griping about how you can’t possibly get by on only $500,000 a year, the way the Wall Street bankers are whining.
Katherine strikes me as an icon for what Michigan people are doing in this time of troubles. Doing what’s necessary to survive, with dignity and pride. No griping about how you can’t possibly get by on only $500,000 a year, the way the Wall Street bankers are whining.
No sense of entitlement, that the world owes them a living. No dependency on the grindings of government.
Just straight-out hard work and fair dealing.
Just straight-out hard work and fair dealing.
Katherine will continue farming, of course, even though she won’t be coming to market any more. That’s work she knows how to do, and she does it well. Her place is on US-12 on the way to Clinton. “The drive is just by the big ‘U-Pick’ sign,” she told me.
In the forward to the great book he did with photographer Walter Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee wrote back in 1941:
“The effort (here) is to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis and defense. More essentially, this is an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”
Katherine, and countless others like her, can be found all throughout our sad, damaged, troubled but magnificent state.
They are, indeed, monuments of human divinity. They all deserve our defense and our admiration.
***
Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.
3 Comments
Bravo, Phil, for painting a wonderful portrait of Katherine of the farmer’s market. I could taste the strawberries on a homemade shortcake from your description of the produce. I could feel Katherine’s courage and fortitude in the challenge of her daily existence in your recitation of her narrative, her voice.
I have known many Katherines in my life and I will cherish them as you do. For they represent the brave, the strong, the best in us all.
Cheers,
Craig
Thanks for this, Phil. It reads like a parable: “…Just straight-out hard work and fair dealing….” The line that hits me between the eye is, “..Sad, damaged, troubled but magnificent state…”
Last night I got back from an energy conference at Crystal Mountain Resort at which I was a speaker, having cut a diagonal across Michigan, in my “American” Chevy Impala. Being mid-summer and sunny, I indulged myself by taking the smaller, less-traveled county roads, adding a couple of hours to my trip. I saw economic decline: mostly mobile homes and hovels (as compared with the McMansions of Livingston and Oakland County). The train tracks have long since been removed from Thompsonville, leaving a town, sad, damaged, troubled but magnificent in its modesty.
I couldn’t help making the comparison with the open land of south Central Denmark which is rather similar to mid-Michigan’s — the Slesvig-Holsten of Bismarcks desiring. (Denmark is also a low country peninsula). Not much has changed in the farm land since, say 1863. You see barns and small outbuildings a hundred years old but the fields look like they haven’t been farmed in decades. Where are the cows? Are they all in the barns now on robot-milking machines? If the EU allows them to exist at all, they get government subsidies for the machinery so that the farmers can produce the same amount of milk with fewer workers. (The machinery manufacturers lunch frequently with the Eurocrats in Brussels) Farmland without cows is disturbing on many levels…And the beautiful children of farmers have long since fled the farms for cities like Flensborg and Copenhagen.
I get home to find that my Danish farm-girl-PhD-wife just bought three containers of tasteless Green Giant strawberries (“at a great price”) — not the strawberries we could have bought from the local farmers in Belleville. It was a matter of convenience given how little time we have to pick our own.
So we have two stories of globalization. And globalization is a long, broadening discussion in Michigan and in the world at large. Do we go with it, or resist it? Shall we re-invent ourselves, or do we need to first re-invent invention? Mixed with the feeling of heartbreak for the people left behind in Michigan, I had a fleeting thought that our Department of Education ought to require a half-semester course in preparing a patent application for an invention of any student’s choosing. (Because of the legacy of the auto industry, there are a lot of people in Michigan who hold patents) But I guess there are a lot of other political agendas competing for the hearts and minds of our high school children.
So I, like you, simply contemplated the moment of divinity I saw in the mother working the cash register of the gas-station-video-store-grocery at Evart Junction.
why is she quitting the farmer’s market but continuing to farm? where is her produce going? Is there some regulatory principle here that is discouraging her from the farmer’s market? Is she reducing production and why? Lot of unanswereds here.