Locally Grown

Food goes out early: muffins split and buttered, a bowl of berries, cut melon, cold cider in glass bottles. The gift table is a plank laid over two crates, and the flowers are whatever was cut that morning, standing in jars with the stems still long.

Guests come in from the lot with cardigans over their arms and find a seat on a bench or a folding chair. The mother to be opens small things: cotton sleepers, a wooden rattle, a stack of cloths. Somebody reads the care instructions off a seedling pot out loud. By noon the crates are repacked, the jars are rinsed in the sink at the back, and everyone leaves with something that needs water.