Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

Today I experienced a wide range of emotions, from reminiscing about my youth to laughing about … well, I forgot about what.

Everything started with smelling a cantaloupe at the farmers market. Actually, cantaloupes. Actually, cantaloupes and roasted chile peppers, but let’s stay only with cantaloupes for now.

I walked by Crooked Sky Farm’s stands, and suddenly I was taken back to the very early 70’s, when I was a little kid dragged by his parents to the seaside, in the small village of 2 Mai (when 2 Mai was still a small village) to get my yearly dose of natural Vitamin D (at a nude beach, but this is an entirely different story), and in front of the only grocery store (Alimentara) there were little old ladies selling cantaloupes from their gardens. The smell, the color, oh, the smell.

Ah, the summer of ’71 … watermelons, cantaloupes, mammoth dill, dust, and sea smells (rotten algae, dead fish, salt sea water): it was a mix that got stuck in my young brain and it will always be associated with that place.

This kind of food memory makes me come back again and again to the farmers’ markets to get fresh veggies and fruits: I was fortunate enough to grow with what is now called organic food. We didn’t know that, then. It was just: go to the market and buy … whatever was on the list … and everything was, well, organic.