Another glimmer of the world I want:

Tonight I was at the co-op, tying up a few of the veggies in the rain, and a woman stopped and asked about the tomatoes. “How do you prune them?” she asked. And so I explained the basics, and we chatted tomatoes, and she said, “Can I pay you to come prune mine sometime? I live next door.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can do it!” I said.

Then I started talking to another person who was coming to shop (another nice, affirming story, perhaps for another day — gardens are as good as dogs for conversation starters), and carried on with my few little tasks, and the woman came back and said, “Really, I could pay cash. It would make me feel so much better. Maybe you could come take a look sometime?”

“Okay,” I said. “How about you put some items in the Community Fridges donation bin in the co-op sometime, and I’ll come to look now.”

We went into her yard and the tomatoes had vined wildly, limbs a tangled snarl and flopped over their cages. So I set about to trying to tame them a little, and we chatted, about gardening, our jobs and our partners’ jobs, as I sorted and pruned. (Really you don’t want to prune in the rain, but in the case I decided to risk it since Kelly was so keen and I was available. Hopefully this story doesn’t take a turn to the fungal.)

Net results: some tomato growing and community fridge education, some neighbourly connection, some food for the community, and, the cherry on top, at the end she presented me with a jar of Wendy B’s Indian chutney, which she and her wife had brought back from her place up north.

This wasn’t a capitalist exchange: we chose the gift economy instead. And that’s what lifted my spirits as I biked home, wet from gardening with a stranger in the rain.