Parading Around the Workings

Curtesy ride out to Starbucks to replenish the coffee supply.  Make that first thing, please.  Odd how entirely similar that would be in Shunyi.  I’d bike rather than drive, though it might have been either means of transport in either city to something that was incorporated in the Pacific North West, now integral to morning in Beijing and morning in New Paltz.  It’s early.  The young woman serves me and begins the grinding process for the coffee beans I bought.  I grabbed something that said “Yukon.”  One muses that Alaska is rather far outside the longitudinal bands for coffee growing, but what do I care.  Grind it up.  For some reason I’m drawn to her arms which are disarmingly hirsute and I reconsider for a moment, this person’s gender. 

My wife asks disarmingly if we could please take a walk today rather than riding a bike somewhere.  I don’t want to agree, but I do.  We walk down the trail in a southward direction and immediately, there is someone right behind us.  He neither advances nor falls back and unwittingly his presence is annoying.  So when my wife asks I automatically agree to turn off the rail trail at the first road we meet, a few hundred yards up the trial.  And soon we have decided to head in to a farm and market that is straight ahead at the upcoming intersection. 

There are farmers in the field, and later we walk by a few trailer homes in which we assume they all live.  There are peppers on the vine and eggplants that have been ignored and are rotting unattended.  I suppose those are beets.  Can’t see.  My wife is enjoying this stroll but I’m increasingly conscious of the fact that we haven’t made clear our intentions to buy things here and perhaps we're not being polite. We might be unwelcome, parading around the workings of someone else’s farm.  Eventually I convince my wife to head inside to actually procure something with me. 

Spaghetti Squash.  Now there’s a thing you’d never see in Beijing.  I imagine serving it up this evening and I like what I’m seeing.  I consider the added umph involved in schlepping two spaghetti squash home and I’m up for the challenge.  They have kimchi.  More likely to find that in Beijing.  I get a bottle of homemade picked cabbage, some of their free-range chicken breasts, an heirloom tomato and a big clove of garlic.  This ought to set me up for a dinner that I could make.

Thursday 10/10/19