farmer dan

here's what it looks like when i drive home after the rain.


so i met farmer dan today. an okie hippie. we went out to pick two bins of melons and ended up with five, not through some over-achieving maneuver to get more melons than really needed, but because i couldn't get dan out of the melon patch, even though it was 6:30 and we were clearly tired and ready to GO HOME. noooo, dan's a talker and talked his way up and down each melon row telling me about golden gophers (no, not a trophy prize for gopher sports, but a particularly shitty type of melon that wyatt has planted for two years in a row) and full slip and half slip and clowns at the farmer's market. every other melon he picked was overripe, so he would lift it above his head and throw it (with an un-hippie sort of violent zeal) on the ground so it would bust and not be mistaken for a good melon again. i took over melon-busting duty to try to hurry him up, but it didn't work and we ended up with five bins of melons. which is fine. just... come on, dan, 6:30.

i then made the mistake of getting in dan's car, "the sooby", for a ride back to my truck so i could get the hell off the field and back to the farm stand to drop off the melons. farmer dan's subaru might be farmer dan's home. we put the melons bins on top of what appeared to be a nesty sleeping space in the back then climbed into the front, which was some kind of farm trash repository covered in some serious grime. and then a miracle of conversation occurred: in the span of no less than four minutes we went from discussing how the melons smelled really good (a big improvement over the usual smell of his car, said HE, not me) to how he pissed his pants once in a traffic accident. i'm not sure how the transition went down from melon to involuntary pissing, but it did, and just as he admitted this embarassing truth we arrived at my truck, so i had to get out of the soob, unload my melons, and bid dan a farewell, hope you don't piss yourself on the way home.