loonies and twoonies

I set three alarms on my cell phone each morning, spaced at fifteen-minute intervals, to make the process of getting out of bed a little more gradual. Usually I set my first alarm for 7:00, or 6:45 on the mornings when I take a shower (it seems kind of silly to shower every morning when I know I'll just get dirty all over again a half hour later, so I usually take a shower every other morning; my goal is not cleanliness so much as keeping the dirtiness to a reasonable level). And usually I'm out of bed after my second alarm, and downstairs eating breakfast by about 7:30, ready for the start of work at 8:00. It's a system that works well for me. Perhaps not quite as well for Sophie and Arnauld, whose room is next to mine and who claim they can hear my alarm every morning. And it's true that sometimes I let it go for a minute or so before I wake up enough to roll over and turn it off. But they have to wake up too, you know.

Saturday, though, is market day. And since the market opens at 8:00, that means we have to be down there by about 7:15 to start setting up. And that means we have to be ready to leave the farm by 7:00, which means that we have to start loading the trucks at about 6:00.

It wasn't until my third alarm went off at 5:45 that I forced myself out of bed to face the day. Or, rather, the night. It's still completely dark outside before 6. Fifteen minutes is not really enough time to eat breakfast, put on four or five layers of warm clothing, and make my way over to the packing shed, but I've noticed that as the seasons change and the sun rises later and later, everyone else seems to be rising slightly later on market days. It's as though we can't get started before we see the slightest hint of deep blue light outside, the guarantee that the sun will rise and the day will come. This morning, we got outside at about 6:20 or so.

Colleen and I emptied the boxes from the cooler and piled them into the two pickup trucks, followed by the three folding tables and the poles that support the tarp that hangs over the stand. The sky was beginning to brighten outside (or at least as much as it was ever going to brighten in this gray, gloomy weather we've been having), but the metal of the six-foot-long poles was still freezing cold. I shoved them in the truck as quickly as I could while still taking great care not to swing them into some vegetables or somebody's head.

The market is right in town, in the parking lot of the shopping center with the post office and the 99-cent store and the little grocery store. Colleen and I arrived first, in the gray truck, a handful of small peaked white roofs already rising above the asphault. We set up the tarp, and then Sue arrived, and we unloaded the trucks, unfolded the tables, set out the vegetables, and put up the little signs with the prices.

There are maybe a dozen regular stands at the farmers' market. There's a guy who sells chainsaw carvings and a woman who makes these really delicious date squares (also called "matrimonial bars," she informed me today, because they were traditionally served at bridal showers), as well as a couple of stands with some tomatoes and carrots and such, but Sue is definitely the main vegetable attraction. Squashes and leeks and lettuce and spinach and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes and chard and carrots and kale, piled high on the table, a rather attractive display of the abundance of the harvest. The market has not been too busy -- I'm told that it's much more crowded during the summer, when all of the tourists are here -- but every once in a while we'll get four or five customers at the same time, and I'll be reaching over Sue at the scale to get to the cash box while Colleen ducks by to weigh a cabbage.

Today, the Saturday before Thanksgiving (in Canada, they celebrate it on what we Americans would call Columbus day), is the last market, so I'm beginning to get the hang of it. I still have to shout over to Sue sometimes for the price of a bag of carrots, but usually (with the help of the electronic scale's addition function) I am able to charge customers approximately the correct price for their vegetables. But for the first couple of weeks, I was a mess. Trying to add together $8.40 and $11.85 in my head, I would invariably give customers the wrong change and forget to ask them if they needed a bag. One customer, a friend of Sue's, kindly suggested that I take a deep breath before helping the next customer.

I'm inclined to blame it on the Royal Canadian Mint, which makes a one-dollar coin (called the "loonie," because of the picture of a loon on the reverse) and a two-dollar coin (the "twoonie") but no one-dollar bill, and whose coins all look alike because they all have the same person on the front. But I suppose that my poor mental math skills may be partly to blame. In my second week at the market, I turned to Sue and said, "You know, I'm actually really good at math. I did really well in calculus." But there's a world of difference between knowing how to find an integral and knowing how to make change, and I don't know which is more useful but I definitely know which one Riverdale didn't teach me.

For some reason, though, I couldn't stay away from the scale. I felt a magnetic draw towards helping the customers, even though I was so bad at it.

But I've gotten better over the past few weeks, I swear. Still, I don't think a customer service job is in my future.

Speaking of money, the big news story on the radio the past couple of weeks has been that the Canadian dollar is actually trading at a higher level than the American dollar. I suppose it's a point of national pride, but I'm not sure how proud you can really be when your unit of currency is named "the loonie." But I guess it's better than the alternative. Sue told me that the original plan for the dollar coin called for a picture of a beaver.