oui

Working at a farmers' market in BC -- trying to remember the price per pound of cauliflower or add $4.65 to $17.80 in my head or return the correct change to the customer -- may have been difficult. But at least it was all in English.

My plan was to leave the farm in Mauricie this past Thursday or Friday, but Lina told me she had signed up to sell bread at three markets that weekend -- one on Saturday, two on Sunday -- and she needed some help. I figured an extra couple of days wouldn't hurt, so I agreed to stick around until Monday (that is, yesterday). It was only after I agreed to help that it occurred to me that there might be a problem. "I don't know how much help I'll be at the markets," I said to Lina, "since I don't speak any French." She reassured me that it wouldn't be a problem; Aline, the German WWOOFer who speaks French fluently, would also be working at the stand, and I would mostly be there to keep her company. I said "Okay," hesitantly, and hoped that Aline would not want to go to the bathroom or anything for the six or seven hours the market was open.

While I was finding myself able to understand more and more of the French conversation that flew around my head all day long, and while I sometimes fantasized that I was close, very close, to being able to speak French myself, and one day soon it would all magically snap into place, I had to admit that a full grasp of the French language still eluded me. Okay, I hadn't gotten very far past "bonjour" and "merci." I had brought a "Teach Yourself French" book, but every time I picked it up and tried to study it, I found that I really didn't have the patience or focus necessary to learn more than a few words. It all seemed too much like work. Besides, there were much more interesting things to read; and if I read Madame Bovary (in translation, of course), then wasn't that sort of like a French lesson? Maybe?

At the market on Saturday, I let Aline do most of the interacting with the customers. This was fine because the first few hours were very slow. Lina showed up to deliver some fresh bread and relieve us at about 2 o'clock (quatorze heure, as the Quebecois say -- see, I'm almost fluent). I was nearly falling asleep, so we decided it would be a good idea to take a walk outside. It felt like... November, and November is a good month for sleeping but it's also a good month for a brisk refreshing walk. We admired the church (every Quebec town has its own beautiful stone church, built in the time when religion was the central force in French Canadian life; I think that nowadays the ratio of beautiful churches to practicing Catholics in Quebec is approximately one-to-one) and some of the more interesting houses. We went back inside for the last couple of hours of the market, and though the pace picked up slightly, only about two-thirds of the loaves were sold.

These markets, by the way, are not like your typical farmers' market. These are Christmas markets, usually held in town halls or other public buildings (though Lina told us of one November market she attended that was held outside), featuring rather more inedibles than edibles. That is, lots of arts and crafts and knitted things and so on -- Christmas presents, I suppose, that unlike bread, will not go stale in the intervening month and a half before the big day. We did also make some Christmas cakes, expertly wrapped in green and red plastic, which are supposed to stay fresh forever on account of their high rum content.

Saturday went well enought -- I hardly had to utter a single word of French -- but Sunday's market came without the promise of relief. Lina had to attend to another market forty-five minutes away, leaving Aline and I to fend for ourselves. In the breaks between helping customers, I had Aline teach me some key French words -- "gouter" for "to taste," and so on. But when Aline inevitably decided she had to go to the bathroom, or take a walk -- who can blame her? the market was from 10 AM till 5 PM -- I was left on my own to deal with the customers.

I may not have picked up much French during my time in Quebec, but I have picked up the truly unfortunate habit of answering "oui" to every French question that I don't understand. Aline told me that "peut-etre" -- maybe -- was always a good answer, but somehow "oui" was the word that slipped most easily out of my mouth. Once, when I got particularly flustered, the woman from the next stand stepped over to answer a question. Fortunately, Aline's absences were always brief, and once she returned, I could go back to smiling mutely at the customers. What I lacked in language skills I tried to make up for in charm and sex appeal. I think I succeeded.

What else, what else? While I was at the farm, Lina put me to work developing a recipe for seasoning salt using the dried mushrooms she grows in the greenhouses. It wasn't very complicated -- a little bit of mushroom plus a lot of salt plus a sprinkling of dried herbs -- and the dust from the ground mushrooms spilled ominously out of the blender after each batch, so if I get emphysema in thirty years, we'll know why. But it pleases me to know that my mushroom salt will grace the kitchens of a few families this winter, perhaps adding the slightest mushroom aroma to some of their most cherished holiday dishes.

I switched the font on some of the labels for the farm products (the cakes, the dried herbs, the mushrooms, the marmelade) from Times New Roman to Garamond. It was all for you, Reed -- carrying your gospel of good font choice into the Canadian wilderness. Unfortunately, the only labels that Lina had were address labels, about one inch by three inches, and in order to accomodate all of the text for the ingredients and instructions and so on, I had to use a font size of approximately five points. But what they lack in legibility they make up for in beauty.

Anyway, Lina drove me to the Trois-Rivieres bus station this morning, and I took a bus into Montreal, where I am spending two nights before coming home just in time for Thanksgiving.