We are readying to leave the Keys and slowly make our way back North. One of the things we will most miss is the access to fresh vegetables and fruit that we have had over the past month. While farms are few in the Keys, we discovered a recently opened produce stand in Islamorada that has wonderfully fresh fruit. Unlike the fruit we get in the North, the mangos and papayas were soft and smelled ready to eat, the tomatoes were firm and flavorful, the strawberries are fresh from the farm.
As we were selecting our food for the next few days, a small woman who was the mother of the owner looked shyly at my wife as though she recognized her and asked, “De donde es usted (Where are you from)?” My wife replied, “Yo soy de Guatemala (I am from Guatemala).” A slight smile crossed her face and she started to tell my wife of her life.
She was born in a small village in Guerrero, Mexico, where there were no public schools. She lamented her lack of an education. She married her husband in 1975 and they came to the United States around 1990 when her little girl was two. This little girl was now a young woman who was helping her brother and mother run the stand.
I looked carefully at this elderly woman. She was short with a tanned square face with glasses to match and pulled-back black hair tinged with grey streaks. Her stubby hands and fingers were powerful as were her forearms. “Tengo fresa, aqui (I have strawberries here), she said climbing into her truck pulling an entire flat of fruit out with the ease of lifting a single piece of paper. I took the flat from her and placed them on an adjacent table. The berries were perfect.
“Son de hoy temprano (They are from today, early),” she said. “Se las doy por $4.50. “Me hijo las vende por $5 la caja grande. Aqui abajo hay un viejo que las vende por $10 por la caja chiquita. Se las estoy dando a buen precio, (I will give them to you for $4.50. My son sells them for $5 for the large box. An old man down the street sells a small box for $10.)” My wife being the consummate bargain seeker said she would take two boxes.
Every time she spoke she pressed her throat through an old grey turtleneck shirt and out croaked a deep raspy sound that was more mechanical than human in nature. She told my wife that when she came to the United States she could only get a job picking lemons as she had no education. She later added that because of all the dust and chemicals in the lemon tree fields, she had this as she pressed her hand into the base of her throat.
She reminded me of the Faustian bargain we have all made in the growing and harvesting of our food. It is on the backs of such people, old before their time, that we can have the flawless peppers, berries and other vegetation that sits in our refrigerators or in a fruit bowel in the kitchen.
It reminded me of a summer when I worked in a commercial nursery making soil, filling and moving pots, planting seedlings. We worked 10 to 11 hours a day, 6 days a week. There were no toilet facilities and when the sprayers came by we were told to stay in the fields. I worked for a summer, she for a lifetime.
Because we were the first customers during the day, we got a $1 a pound off for everything we bought. Mangos, papayas, bananas, strawberries, peppers, cucumbers and a tomato. As they had not set up the register for the day, the young girl was trying to add up everything on a piece of paper. She was having a hard time with simple multiplication so I volunteered to do the math: .44 pounds of tomatoes at $1.50 a pound: 75 cents (I always round up); 1.7 pounds of bananas at 70 cents a pound: $1.25.
My wife smiled and told the woman that my father had been a math teacher. Her new friend smiled and replied, “Es muy bueno que el es educado, (It is very good that he is educated.”) as she emptied the strawberries into a bag and packed the remainder of our purchase.
