Yesterday, after AJ woke up from his nap, we drove to the farmer�s market for the first time this season. This particular market doesn�t start until July, and it always feels like summer is practically over before it begins. After years of doing most of my summer grocery shopping at the mammoth market at Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago, this one is puny by comparison, but it has everything you need. I bought green and yellow zucchini, a huge tomato, my most favorite goat cheese (a semi-soft with a sharp smell and a mild creamy taste) and fresh trout and chocolate chip cookies for AJ. We stopped to watch a storyteller, who had every child under the age of 12 rapt in her telling of The Gingerbread Man. After a brief stop at a nearby library, a favorite place of AJ�s, we headed home where I threw together a fabulous market dinner. I saut�ed the squash lightly in olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and topped with parmesan and some herbed bread crumbs I had leftover from a chicken recipe earlier this week, then broiled the dish until it was bubbly, while saut�ed the trout filets in lemon butter. I topped the fish with minced parsley and served it with the squash and a fat slice of tomato topped with a slice of the goat cheese. It was outstanding and incredibly easy. I wish there was a farmer�s market every day.

When I was living in London as a child, food shopping was a world apart from our weekly trips to the supermarket. There was, as far as I know, only one supermarket in the greater London area and it was quite a drive from our central London home. We did most of our shopping on the high street behind our block of flats, wandering from the grocers for dry goods across the street to the greengrocers for produce and finishing at the butcher�s before hurrying home with our white paper packages in our shopping trolley. Grocery shopping was probably somewhat more time consuming, but it also had an air of civility that American supermarket shopping completely lacks. I always liked being the one sent to the grocer�s to ask for one of the yellow packets of Weetabix, which were kept on the top shelf, just under the tin ceiling. Mr. W., one of the two white-aproned grocers, both of whom seemed to me to be about 106, moved slowly to the corner to fetch the pair of pincers on a long pole that enabled him to grab the cereal packets without having to resort to a stepstool. My brother and I loved to watch him stretch out the long mechanical arm and grab with precision a single packet from a shelf crammed full. It was a gesture both elegant and awe-inspiring, fraught as it was with the possibility of a calamatous avalanche of cereal and imbued with the sense of another era. Something about the farmer�s market reminded me of that experience, of the ritual of food, of the social network that lies beyond each and every essential action.

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I must have still been feeling philosophical this morning when, at the breakfast table, I picked up the paper and engaged in my habitual reading of the obituary notices. I�ve been reading obituaries as long as I can remember, It�s my fascination with biography that drives me. Every notice is a window into a life. This morning my eye was caught by one in particular because of the strange names listed under the friends of the deceased: �Thomas, Percy, Edward, Ben, Bill, Henry, Salty, Diesel Ten, Dirty Percy and a trainload of others.� These friends, are, as anyone friendly with a small boy knows, Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. The obituary was for a small boy, just AJ�s age, who died of heart failure at the age of four. It�s the only time I can remember my somewhat morbid morning habit making me cry. Part of me wants to write a letter to the parents, but to say what exactly? That I�m a mother of a four-year-old boy whom they�ve never met and that I cannot even begin to fathom their loss? Would it be a strange thing to make a donation to the charity in the notice in his name, I wonder? Is the compulsion to do so sympathy or gratitude that it is not my own child?

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In the never-a-dull-moment world of the harriet household, the usual quiet of AJ�s naptime has been disturbed once again by the wildlife. There is, apparently, a muskrat in our backyard. He has wandered way too far from his watery habitat in the pond and now appears to be dying in the dry streambed at the back of our yard. My husband, after summoning me for mammal identification, is in the process of filling a large aluminum roasting pan with water and hauling it back to see if it might help. Although I�d like to think that it�s his concern for all living creatures that is fueling this attempt at muskrat revival, I suspect the humanitarian gesture is at least partly driven by the desire to avoid having to contend with disposing of a dead muskrat on a very hot day. And if you'll now excuse me, I have to go help water a muskrat.

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