118 animal, vegetable, miraclemunicate the consumer value of their care, and how it benefi ts the
neighborhood. This may seem like a losing battle. But the “Buy Cheap
Eats” crusade is assisting the deaths of our compatriots at the rate of
about 820 a day; somebody’s bound to notice that. We are a social animal.
The cost- benefit ratios of neighborliness are as old as our species, and
probably inescapable in the end.
/
Ashfield, Massachusetts, is as cute as it gets, even by the standards of
small-town New En gland. Downtown is anchored by a hardware store
with rocking chairs on the front porch. The big local social event where
folks catch up with their neighbors is the weekly farmers’ market.
I didn’t know this when we arrived there to stay at a friend’s house. We
brought our cooler in with the luggage, planning to give our hostess some
of our little fi st- sized tomatoes. These carefully June- ripened treasures
would wow the New En glanders, I thought. Oops. As I started to pull
them out of the cooler I spied half a dozen huge red tomatoes, languidly
sunning their shapely shoulders in our friend’s kitchen window. These
bodacious babes made our Early Siberians look like Miss Congeniality. I
pulled out some blackheart cherries instead, presenting them along with
an offhand question: Um, so, where did those tomatoes come from?
“Oh, from Amy at the farmers’ market,” she said. “Aren’t they nice?”
Nice, I thought. In the third week of June, in western Mass, if they
taste as good as they look they’re a doggone miracle. I was extremely curi-
ous. Our host promised that during our visit she would take us to see
Amy, the tomato magician.
On the appointed morning we took a narrow road that led from Ash-
field up through wooded hills to a farm where Amy grows vegetables and
her partner Paul works as a consultant in the design and construction of
innovative housing. Their own house is pretty much the defi nition of in-
novative: a little round, mushroom- shaped structure whose sod- and-moss
roof was covered in a summer pelt of jewelweeds. It was the kind of set-
ting that leads you to expect an elf, maybe, but Paul and Amy stepped out
instead. They invited us up to the roof where we could sit on a little bench.
Ulan the dog followed us up the ladder stairs and sat panting happily as