Lettuce, eggs and time

Wednesday morning in GroveAtopia means lettuce and eggs.  Well it does for me and about a dozen or so others who go to the same lettuce and egg lady to pick them up fresh every week.   We go to her house between 8:30 and 10:00 a.m. and she has them waiting for us.  A dozen eggs and a ziplock bag of fresh greens.  

Some get more than lettuce and eggs.  They get whatever her garden is yielding at the moment. It might be carrots and beets.  Onions and green beans.  Cucumbers and kale.  It might even be all of that and more.  Whatever it is, it will all be fresh, picked just yesterday, packed into the bag you brought and ready for you to eat as if you'd grown it yourself.

However, as is the case with so many things in GroveAtopia, picking up the lettuce and eggs is not just that.  Each of us spends time talking with the lettuce and eggs lady, catching up with what's been happening over the past week, or just talking about whatever comes to mind.   

This kind of thing happens all the time in GroveAtopia.  As a result, we GroveAtopians must estimate how long our errands will take not in terms of distance, traffic or parking availability.

Instead we measure it in terms how long we are likely to find ourselves conversing with whomever we are doing business with, or whomever we happen to run into on our way to doing what we originally left the house to do.  

In the end our errands probably take as long as they do in the big city, but here we use that time greeting, talking and sharing, instead of sitting in gridlock, waiting at traffic lights or waiting in line with strangers.

Now the lettuce and eggs lady lives just around the corner, and if I chose the efficient route I could leave my house, pick them up and be home in 5 minutes.  But I know that my simple purchase will never take just that amount of time.  Because when I arrive, there I am, in her home, standing in her living room, buying from her what she and nature have labored together to make.  You can't do that with efficiency as your goal.  

So even if you thought you wanted a quick trip, even just this once, because perhaps you are in a hurry for one reason or another, when she answers the door and invites you in, you greet each other, and from that point on, no matter what you talk about, be it the weather or the garden or what you heard about so and so or this and that, you know that efficiency is not what you are after. 

What you are really after is what you just got.   Lettuce, eggs and time.