three old women are sitting...

three old women are sitting at a picnic table sheeling half runners and pulling husk and silk off silver queen. the clouds are moving around in the sky the way sand does in one of the toys which is two pieces of glass pressed together with sand between them, and every few minutes, you flip the two pieces of glass over and the sand runs down between different holes and spaces formed by tiny slats of plastic. the clouds have that in them this morning, and the world seems to be turning them this way and that just by moving on it's own toylike axis, which is to say, it is the kind of morning a child would want if he saw it in a store window and could a hold of his mother's skirt and tug on it hard enough to stop her from talking long enough to her friends who are all intenet on everything but what might be in a store front window thata little boy would have an interest in.

The women have been meeting at this table for near on twenty years every saturday and every sunday during the growing seasons, spring isearly vegetables and summer is another thing and in the late summer comes all the goodness, and with it, conversations a milliion miles long and a thousand years old as thet sit and get everything ready for the farmers market in town where everyone is buyging local and going and green and the three women think that is pretty funny; having a youngster and his wife and two kids packing off local food in their hybrid, trying to start up discusions with the vendors about how wendell berry changed their lives and really made them realize what it was in they were missing.

it's like taking an egg out from under a fat hen, says one woman, not say it mean,ut with a wink in her eye. people say my grandmother grew up on a farm, or, when we were kids, my daddy had a farm down in south carolina where he raised white face or angus - hell, he had to pay a city lawer to get him out from under that just as soon as he lost interest in them cows and the bills came in, but these women don't live on farms, they live on their families land where things have been growing one way or another for four and five generations. they sometimes keep a cow or four, and always have chickens, nobody makes a living ona  farm anymore, and butter and egg money is butter and eggs from the yard, so these gatherings is more about speaking to the times when the mountains weren't so crowded and the men went off the mountain to earn cash money. things have changed so much, all they got left is to sell a few vegetables to a lot of city folks, and to speak to the rythm of everything come before this day which was good and unfetterred by change and development and an economy that never paid them no mind until it broke down the mines or stopped the construction jobs. they know poor is something rich folks talk about, and they don't eckon they have ever been rich, and they know for sure they been without, but it wasn't poor, it was making do and working a little longer and a little harder at something to come along that could bring a meal or a trade or maybe cash money to the table. three women sitting at a table, their voices warming in the morning air, nothing ever got done around here without god's hand in it somehow says one over with the silver queen...........