Been thinking about…this moment between June and May

Saturday morning and the mountain humidity is mounting, fog burning off from river lake below, hot late spring sun peeking through night clouds clearing as the minutes tick by. I’m still bemused by old turn-of-the-century tourist brochures touting the Ozarks’ “cooling summer breezes.” It’s only nine o’clock in the morning and I’ve already sweated through my shirt, confident it won’t be the last time today. Saturday morning markets are a lot of work.

Just one year ago, StateoftheOzarks moved the Hollister Farmers Market just out of town, specifically to Vintage Paris Coffee across from the Branson Scenic Overlook, specifically “7900 Historic Highway 165,” as I have memorized in hundreds of social media videos since. The move was a good one. “This isn’t the kind of market that feels like a crowded swap meet…,” Mama Bear’s Bakes’ Amanda Adair wrote last week (and no, I didn’t pay her to comment). “Every vendor space [at StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market] feels intentional, beautifully styled and thoughtfully curated, creating a relaxed and elevated atmosphere that makes shopping genuinely enjoyable.”

None of that happens by accident and it’s a strange revelation that I’m the captain of this particular ship of sorts. While I certainly have a vision for community coming together in beautiful ways, let’s face it, I don’t like getting up early on Saturday morning or working to remember every moving part to make sure we all come together in a cohesive and pleasant sort of way. The instability of May’s atmosphere hasn’t helped either. Despite making it through this Saturday market without rain, that wasn’t what the forecast had said all week. “Look at that rain,” I overheard a random person saying on Thursday, “and did you know it’s supposed to rain right through the weekend.” I refrained from tossing my hot coffee in that person’s general direction. 

One hundred pounds of red tomatoes and some 40 pounds of sweet potatoes unloaded, and I’m placing “Farmers Market Open Today” signs along the routes leading to the market. Social media is lovely but nothing beats a good old sign with an arrow. My favorite turnaround overlooks the White River (now Lake Taneycomo since 1913), right at the manicured lawn with the big black oak tree. The view and the oak tree are nice, but I like omens and the particular good omen associated with this spot is a fat groundhog who wriggles across the lawn regularly. I pause the truck. No groundhog. Hopefully not a bad omen. These are the games I play with myself, like counting cars at the intersection, or wishing on a falling star. More than that, I just like groundhogs. I find a certain hope in caring about animals others hate. Empathy born of pain does interesting things to the human heart. 

“He plays under the tree,” says Derek Jacobi’s character Professor Wright in the 2019 film “Tolkien.” “He dances around it. Stands beneath its branches for shade or shelter. He kisses under it. Sleeps under it. He weds under it. He marches past it on his way to war, and limps past it on his journey home.”

I’ve marched to many wars in my life, and limped home many times, the last dozen or so to a home not even my own, almost to a face I could scarcely recognize, unfamiliar within my own skin. Loss does strange, quiet things to the soul, things that cannot be healed through easy words. 

Back at the market, the crowd builds beneath the heat. Dale is busy bagging early Ozarks tomatoes and talking with customers, friends, much as he has done for some six years. In many ways, this is his market, not mine as I took the reins only by necessity after an unexpected stroke put my publisher, mentor, friend, in an ICU coma back in July 2024. Those were dark, private days, private wars played out before a social media world as the community watched. It is in those moments you learn who your friends really are. Gratitude mixes with a very long memory.

The evening storms are over, grand tempest clouds clearing before a glorious blue moon and blazing eye star. Antares burns hot in the near-summer sky. There is magic in a sky too easily ignored, the kind of magic men like Tolkien once saw. The Ozarks sleep again, waiting for another holy Sunday.

There is another kind of sacred too easily overlooked. The sacred moment of the everyday, the plain and painful, the great holiness of time and attention and care created by people regarded as “normal” and “everyday.” A cup of flour measured lovingly into a cake to be baked for a child, another line of ink on page or skin, another word, another brush stroke, another rep at the gym, another song, another puppy resting loving head on our leg when we have work to do. In the end, another moment to take nothing for granted, here, even now, in this moment between June and May.