I want to be clear that I had a good time. I want that on record before I describe what happened.
It was early Tuesday morning, the kind of Durango morning that almost makes you feel like a person who has their life together — sixty-three degrees, bright, the air still clean before whatever smoke the afternoon was promising. The farmers' market was in full swing down on Main, and Pax had announced the night before that he wanted to go. His exact words were "I'll handle it." I should have written them down.
Pax is the kind of person who approaches a twelve-vendor farmers' market like he's staging a land campaign. He had a list. Not a phone list — a physical list, folded into quarters, retrieved from his back pocket with the gravity of a man producing classified documents. Peaches, goat cheese, that hot sauce he'd seen someone else buy two weeks ago and had not stopped thinking about.
"I just want to have a plan," he said.
The plan lasted approximately four minutes.
The issue was the jam lady. There is a woman at the end of the row who sells small-batch jams and she had, this particular Tuesday, a new flavor: something involving lavender and some kind of stone fruit I couldn't identify. Pax stopped. Pax picked up six jars. Pax began asking questions that suggested he was considering a significant lifestyle pivot into jam.
"Do you ever do wholesale?" he asked her. She looked at him. I looked at him. He put down two jars and picked up three different ones.
We had come for peaches. We now owned more jam than two people can consume before mold becomes a factor.
The rest of the market proceeded on a similar logic. He found a vendor selling what he described as "an extremely reasonable cutting board" — his tone suggested the cutting board had been undervalued by the market and he was simply correcting for inefficiency. He ate three samples of something spicy and then stood very still for a moment with his eyes watering, doing that thing where he refuses to acknowledge discomfort because he chose the discomfort. He got into a long conversation with a man about heirloom tomato varieties that I do not think either of them fully understood but which both seemed to enjoy deeply.
We did eventually find the peaches. He held one up like he was appraising a gem.
By this point I had the tote bag, because of course I had the tote bag, and it contained: four jars of jam, one cutting board, a small cactus he claimed was for his desk, a bag of green chile kettle corn, and the peaches. No hot sauce. He had forgotten about the hot sauce entirely. When I pointed this out he said "that's fine, I think I'm more of a jam guy now" with complete sincerity.
We got back to the car just as the sky was doing that thing where it can't quite decide — still sunny above, but a particular shade of blue piling up over the mountains to the west that meant afternoon thunderstorms were somebody else's problem for exactly the next four hours. Pax stood at the trunk reorganizing the tote bag with the focused energy of a man who had accomplished something.
"Good morning," he said.
And here's the thing. It was. It genuinely was. The town was alive and smelled like green chile and the vendors were happy and we had more jam than we needed, which is honestly a solid position to be in. The cutting board is, fine, a good cutting board. He wasn't wrong about that.
He is never wrong about anything in the ways that matter, which is the central chaos of my life and also the reason I let him carry the list.
The cactus died within a week. He took it very personally.