The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
You are driving home. It’s not a long trip, not so long as to be tedious, anyway. You’re coming from a joyful event, a wedding maybe or a birthday party for a beloved relative, and it is a perfect fall day. The top is down and a pleasant breeze tosses your hair. You decide to get off the highway onto a country lane that’s barely wide enough for two cars to pass in opposing directions. A mile off the main road, you spy a covered stand at the head of an orchard of orange and gold that stretches across the hills as far as you can see. There is a big green sign. Foot-tall white letters accented with a red drop shadow. You pull onto the siding and roll to a stop, the pop and grind of gravel under your tires.
There is a girl at the stand, 17 or 18 years old, in a blue and white gingham dress and a green apron with the same white letters trimmed in red as the sign. She stands princess over a kingdom of apples, bushels of red and baskets of green and yellow, pies as big as phonograph records wrapped in waxed paper and glass jugs of cider. You inhale the tart, earthy scent and think you could stay there forever in that place with the sun high in its brilliant blue sky. Sell the car, buy a work shirt and dungarees. Prune the miles and miles of trees in the spring and summer, pick the harvest in the fall and retire to a rocker in front of the fire with a good book or maybe an orchardists journal for the winter months. But you cannot and will not. Instead, you buy a pie and some cider and give the girl a smile and a flirty wink as you drive off.
The scene could be anywhere, from Washington state to Wisconsin to Ohio, but it’s not. It’s Maine. And it could be any time, but it’s the late ’30s, the years right before the war. And you don’t get to stay because none of it is real, and none of it ever has been.
I penned those words as the introduction to a book I originally titled “The Little House on the Highway.” It was to be about my failed attempt at self-reliant homesteading in the ’80s. If I ever get around to finishing it now, though, I expect the title will be “Back to the Garden.” Times change. People change.
The first chapter of the original “fish out of water/comedy of errors” version was going to be called (and maybe still will be) “I Blame John Irving.” It explains how I fell in love with the romanticized version of mid-century rural life in Maine featured in “The Cider House Rules” and humorously lays the blame for my agricultural misadventures at the feet of Mr. Irving. But there was a second, less obvious influence that I have only recently come to understand, and it is right there, hidden in plain sight in that sweeping introduction.
Moser’s Farm Market was a farm stand on U.S. Hwy. 20 in Perrysburg, Ohio, a couple of miles down the road from the apartment my wife and I rented as we began our lives in the Toledo suburbs. That small efficiency unit had its advantages – you could clean the whole thing top to bottom in about 15 minutes – but it left something to be desired for a couple of kids who had grown up in the country. Moser’s became a touch-point for the rural lives we’d left behind. It was typical as farm stands go, a low-slung red metal building with garage doors along the front, which could be raised to give the feel of an open-air market or closed to extend the season into the fall and early winter. The front three-quarters of the building, which was probably 2,000 square feet in total, was dedicated to stacks and bins and barrels of fresh produce; much of it grown on the Moser farm. A cooler held soft drinks, milk, cheese and pies in one back corner, while the other featured locally made arts and crafts. Visiting Moser’s was like taking a little trip to the country, even though it was within a stone-toss of a Kmart and a Taco Bell.