Brigadoon

Two American tourists happen upon a Scottish village where there is dancing and music on a summer day. It feels magical because it is.  This town of Brigadoon only appears once every hundred years and life advances one day at a time, in one hundred year intervals.  I think of this (Lerner and Loewe musical) storyline often in this life we live.

Specifically this time, we are all comfortably squirreled away in our cozy houses, spending our hundred years quietly. And then on a designated Sunday, we appear again at the stand, dressed in our work costumes. The tourists who show up at the stand (living their own Brigadoon life, actually) never think that we have spent most of the last month sitting in front of the fire, reading books, doing crossword puzzles, knitting.  

At 8:00, we meet up and start pulling carts of vegetables out of the coolers. To be honest, we had to put those vegetables in the cooler on the good weather days that came before, but that is invisible work. No one saw us do it and so it is shrouded in the mists of non-time. We chat while we put leafy things into bags and carrots into boxes.  This routine has evolved over these hundreds of years, so effortlessly, that we barely need to speak about what we are doing.  At about 9:40 the early birds start to arrive because 10:00 is just too long to wait for. And the place fills up with happy, busy shoppers. The American tourists would be able to tell this is a specific time because now we are wearing masks. But when we appear out of the mists again next year, maybe we won't need masks.

The day goes on like this, with cheerful greetings and conversations that we have had since the beginning of humankind.  The tourists fade away and we retreat back into our timeless existence.

Brigadoon happens in other venues for us too -- like when we go to market in December and in February, where there isn't really any farming happening in between the market days. We arrive, looking like we always do, with crates of fresh and lovely food, wearing our heavy duty farmer clothes. We have those market conversations, we load up, we go back home and get back into our pajamas. When there is no other real work to do, picking is a breeze. We find the nicest part of the week and we make a plan and we get it done, but it feels like entertainment more than work.

At other times of year, I think about this appearing and disappearing trick, mostly when we do something that only happens once or is absolutely seasonal, like pressing cider.  That cider press sits there, unseen and unvisited, for 11 months of the year. Then Jon gets out the power washer and cleans everything up, makes cider once a week in October, and then leaves the stage for a year.

And when we go to Hawaii, that is the most Brigadoony experience of all. We visit our relatives and for the last 50+ years we have always gone to the same house in the same valley with the same aunt who lives there.  That era will end soon, as the aunt and uncle (sister and brother, long story) who have happily greeted us will undoubtedly be unable to manage living there forever. But when we land at the airport (serious Brigadoon experience, complete with the same breezy humid air on our skin every single time) and get a car and drive down that timeless highway that gets you to the comfortable suburbs in the valleys and you drive up those streets that have not changed, not changed at all, in 50 years, you really feel like you are in a play. The people who live there are stuck in time (from our vantage point) and when we arrive, the day starts again. Because the intervals are pretty long, I have distinct memories of my own developmental stages (third grade, sixth grade, eighth grade...) as we have walked through that front door for yet another lengthy visit. Magical in a different way -- the sound of the door closing is identical visit after visit because the house is constructed very lightly, so the wall and the door kind of shake together when the door clicks closed. And since the beginning of all time, you can hear through the walls every dog and voice of the neighbors around. It's not intrusive, it is the soundtrack of that life. We do think it is pretty funny that they lock their doors since the walls could be cut with a pocketknife, practically.

I also feel like workers who come back to visit after a lifetime away from here, they must feel like they are coming upon a mysterious place that doesn't change. Of course it really does change, but the essence has held steady since the beginning. The buildings are still constructed by on-farm folks, the fields look the same, the vegetables are utterly reliable, and so many of the people have just been aging gracefully and slowly while we wait for visitors.

There is really nothing better than aging gracefully and slowly, so if that is our version of Brigadoon, we are living the dream.