Keeping Time
The email from the market staff landed in my inbox reminding me that this Sunday begins our regular season with market hours returning to opening at 9 AM. In a conversation with the market management last week, they remarked that the customers want the hours to remain the same year-round. On the other hand, the vendors were bemoaning losing our 30 extra minutes to ease into our Sunday mornings. One went so far as to say how much they enjoyed the time they had to shop and socialize with fellow vendors during their extra half hour during the winter season. “It’s what I consider family time,” remarked one long time farmer who considers all their fellow vendors family. For us, we are losing 30 minutes.
As if getting used to the new time for market opening isn’t bad enough, the following week is daylight savings time. More changes that many folks would like to have remain the same, except for the people who want their sunrise and sunset at a decent hour.
And to make all this adding and taking away time more confusing, this month we were given an extra day with leap year. Some cultures consider this day as a break for routines and cultural norms, but for a farmer (and most people), it’s just another day. Blame it on Julius Ceasar (yes, that Julius Ceasar) who added the extra day to the annual calendar in 45 BC. He still didn’t get it right causing a seasonal drift of 8 days every thousand years. The Gregorian calendar created in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII fixed the problem and we’re still using it today. There’s a couple professors at Johns Hopkins University who have proposed adding an entire week to December every six years and getting rid of leap year. I don’t know about that one.
While the Gregorian calendar is used throughout the world for business continuity, there are numerous calendars in assorted cultures that lead to having a variety of New Year celebrations throughout the year. We just finished up the Chinese and Korean New Years last week, Iranian New Year will be in March, and southern Indians will celebrate Ugadi in April. October is filled with New Year celebrations for an assortment of cultures including Jews, Indians, Muslims, and Aborigines—all of whom keep time in their own cultural calendars.
Having recently finished physicist Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time, I have been pondering his theories on time and how we perceive it based upon our reality. While astronomers and physicist have historically chopped up our lives into neat divisions of time that can be measured based upon resonance frequencies of atoms using microwave electromagnetic radiation, farmers have been measuring time through growing cycles. Pastoralists were most likely to have measured how many sleeps occurred between the breeding of their livestock and the arrival of newborns, since imprinting humans onto babies often resulted in tamer animals. Knowing this amount of time would have been crucial knowledge during the initial domestication of livestock by humans.
When agriculture turned to the domestication and selective breeding of plants, time was measured in seasons— the planting, the growing, and the harvest. Thanks to that big glowing orb in the night sky, farmers had a better idea of the ideal times for cultivation. Even today we still refer to full moons by there folklore monikers, such as Corn Moon, Harvest Moon, and Strawberry Moon. I am down to my last baggie of frozen strawberries, so that moon will be a welcome site for me.
With grocery stores and the global transportation of our food supply, we have lost track of our seasonality within our food system. Last week I was gifted with citrus from the Southern California Valley, famous for its tangerines, where I had lived for nearly 20 years. Absolutely nothing beats fresh, local citrus. Valley life revolved around the growing and harvest cycles for those particular crops. Compared to the apples, pairs, cherries, peaches, and such of the mid Atlantic fruit belt, the timeline is quite different.
Out there strawberries are grown year-round, which kind of takes away their specialness.
I believe our modern perception of time combined with the always available commodities strips us of the anticipation and joy we attain from seasonal foods. No one ever says that they can’t wait to go to the grocery store and see what might be available this week. It is just another rote task to be scratched off the list. But when the first strawberries (and figs) of the season arrive at market, people literally run to be first in line. That’s true happiness.
Familiar faces that we haven’t seen since last fall will begin trickling back into the market as the weeks come. Another market season that will evolve into the parade of fresh fruits and vegetables most to take for granted.
One way I never expected to experience time was through the children of my fellow vendors and customers. It’s been pretty amazing to watch so many grow up and become young adults. I am always shocked when they head off to college and I ask myself, have I really been doing this that long? I guess it’s just time getting away from us.