The Christmas holiday is a great time to catch up with reading. The trouble is I couldn’t decide if I should finish the pile from 2009 or start with the new one for 2010. Instead, I dug back, way back, to 1975 when John McPhee wrote “Giving Good Weight” in The New Yorker.

In this classic story (published as a book of the same name along with four other splendid stories), he describes what it was like to work as a farmer in upstate New York, and sell at the greenmarkets of Harlem and Brooklyn. What is remarkable to me is that his vivid description of the personalities, the setting, the conversations, and the concern for the land seems like it was written today.  Here’s the opening passage:

“

You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your string beans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are—people of the city—and we, who are, almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales.

”

Later this month our mobile bookstore will be at the Washington State Farmers Market Association conference in Renton. This is one timeless book that we will be sharing.