posted by Lisa

…a story in pictures about desire lost and found.

Week 2 at the Koloa Sunshine Market, we came for the regular things: greens, radishes, mountain spinach, tomatoes, fiddlehead ferns, mountain apples, and a back breaking assortment of mangoes, papayas, pineapples, passion fruit, apple bananas.  Everything was rough and beautiful as always, and Ella and Finn knew their way around the small market this time, so they were excited to help pick out our haul and scavenge from table to table.  There was a lot of begging, and a lot of giving in on my part. They understand what a farmers market is from our life back home, so this was an adventure they could understand.  And if a part of their excitement about being on Kauai involved purchasing and eating lots of local (and new to them) produce, who was I to deny them?

We had to buy an extra pint of tomatoes and several more bananas to replace the ones that they ate while walking around, but we got all of the things we needed quickly (before they sold out), plus two beautiful sprays of orchids that lasted all week.

But, what I most wanted was a banana bloom to chop and stir fry, or chop and toss in our greens. I had wanted this all week, and I searched everywhere, and while there were several wild ones hanging from the trees, and more strewn on the ground outside the market, there were none to be bought.

Still, the trip was not without adventure for any of us.

We found this:

A soursop fruit, which was creamy and sweet and a little tart.  I liked it, but my family wouldn’t touch it. It stayed at the market.

Ella had great fun with our camera, snapping off two dozen pictures of the farmers and their goods. My favorite is this study in yellow and green:

And we enjoyed more coconut, especially when the man with the machete hacked ours open so we could eat the meat after the water was gone.

The machete was much larger than it looks, and shells did fly.

Then, we struck gold.

Across the path, Finn & my husband spied the sugar cane:

They bought and contemplated the sugar cane:

And Finn quickly appropriated said sugar cane. Because really, what is better in life than sugar in the form of a bat?