by M. Torres

Created on: July 05, 2008   Last Updated: October 20, 2009

I guess when most people think of roadside vegetable stands, they think of homegrown goodness, freshness, or an alternative to shopping at the same place week after week. However, when I see roadside vegetable stands, I don't think of any of these things. Instead, my mind wanders back to simpler times. Times when gardens were planted out of necessity, not profit. Times when we grew what we ate, canned what we couldn't, and gave the rest away. Times when a hoe was a garden tool and it wasn't considered child abuse to make your kids use it. Times when we still understood that if we took care of the land, the land would take care of us. Times when the scariest thing in our tomatoes was blight and we didn't even know what salmonella was.

Roadside vegetable stands remind me of the self-sufficiency that's been lost over the years. There used to be a time when people were self-reliant. It wasn't a personal choice, it was a necessity if they wanted to survive. People had to learn to use what they had and do the best they could with it. They tilled the dirt, farmed the ground, raised and milked the cows, and kept the chickens not as an FFA project, but as a means of providing for their families when money was scarce. It was a time that people slept at night because they were tired and they not only slept, but they rested...knowing they had done what they could for the day.

Roadside vegetable stands remind me of an innocence lost. As a kid, I could eat tomatoes off the vine and not worry about contracting an intestinal illness. I didn't even know what an intestinal illness was. Nor did I ever imagine that within twenty five years, somebody would tell me this is unsafe and that I was putting my life in danger by eating tomatoes at all. I could wander back roads and train tracks and creek beds in late spring looking for the plumpest, juiciest blackberries without worrying that I was going to get abducted. I was too busy looking out for the snakes my mama warned me about to pay attention to whether anyone was following me. I could pick and shell peas right along side my granny in the pea patch and nobody blinked at her for violating child labor laws. I could eat watermelon (that hadn't been put on ice or wrapped in cellophane) from the old man's garden down the road on my front porch on summer nights without worrying about contracting West Nile Virus from the hundreds of swarming mosquitoes in the porch light. I could ride calves, spar with goats, and chase pigs without

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