Do you always want what you can’t have? And does not being able to get it, whatever “it” is, make it that much more beguiling?
Saturday morning I got into the old but still classy champagne Mercedes, blasted the atmospheric soup with cold air, and purred down to the Pearl Farmer’s Market, Pearl convenes every Saturday in a stultifyingly hot parking lot near a bend in the San Antonio River where you can pretend to get cool by gazing at water lilies that look like enormous four leaf clovers.
The opening bell hadn’t rung yet, so I wandered around, chatting on the phone with assorted friends and relations. Meanwhile I was being driven mad with desire by the luscious, look-but-don’t touch-produce arranged enticingly on the tables. Was it my imagination or on a gloomy morning, did the fruits and vegetables glow like radiant gems in a dark, humid cave?
Were the peaches more intensely fragrant because I couldn’t scoop them right into my straw shopping bag? Was it more urgent to buy a dozen squash blossoms, gloriously painted in shades of flame orange, yellow and green, because I had to wait 20 minutes?
I'll let you decide. Here's what I saw, and bought, after the bell sounded.
The first Tex-King peaches of the season from Rhew Orchards in Floresville, south of San Antonio. Not quite ripe, but a fragrance as sweet as honey. One more day to perfection…
Bundles of Royal Velvet lavender picked early Friday evening. Intoxicating perfume, gorgeous dark purple blooms, from the fields at Imagine Lavender in Vanderpool.
Golden clouds of delicate oyster mushrooms, so fragile that they looked as if they might dissolve in a gust of wind.
Squash blossoms from Oak Hill Farms in Jourdanton, dazzling in electric hues of yellow and orange, streaked with lime green. Visions of quesadillas stuffed with these delicate flowers and a little queso fresco…
Ultraviolet artichoke flowers on the stalk, as luminous as the early evening sky around Santa Fe. Didn’t someone once say that artichokes taste like violets?