1 dn. temu
Last evening of August I ran the Heritage northeast out past Goodlettsville and kept going until the road quit having a shoulder to speak of. Out toward Cottontown, where the fence lines do more work than the pavement does and every mailbox has a name on it that has been standing there longer than the blacktop has.
There is a produce stand out that way, if stand is the word for it. Piece of plywood across two sawhorses under a tin roof somebody nailed to four posts, and on the plywood a row of tomatoes, a basket of okra, and four watermelons picked that same day judging by the dirt still on them. Nobody sitting with it. No prices anywhere except one written on a paper plate. Tomatoes two dollars a basket, melons five. And a coffee can with a slot cut in the plastic lid.
I shut the motor off, which I have gotten in the habit of doing out there. Fields on both sides going gold at the edges the way they do the last week of August, and a dog barking somewhere back at the house that never once came out to see about me. I lifted the can, not to look in it, just to know. It was heavy.
Now I have read the same pieces everybody else has about how nobody trusts a soul anymore, and here is a man leaving a whole day of his work out on a board by the road with a coffee can to hold the money. He does not know me from Adam. I could have put the melons in one saddlebag and the can in the other and been two miles gone before that dog got serious about it. That thought goes through anybody's head and then it goes on out the other side, because the can is not there because he is naive. The can is there because he has run the numbers over a lot of Augusts and it still comes out ahead.
I bought a melon I had nowhere to put. Rode home with it in the crook of my left arm at about thirty miles an hour, a speed I have not held on purpose in years, feeling ridiculous and in no hurry whatsoever. Two cars came up behind me and neither one of them honked, and I have decided to believe they understood the situation.
September now. The light is already coming in at a different angle of an evening and the fields are past their best. I will run out that way again in a week and see whether the melons held out. If the plywood is bare I will know summer is properly done with, and if the can is still sitting there I will put something in it anyway.