My dear friend Annika who lives in Magdeburg recently wrote to me after the vegetable vendor's shop at the end of her street, Gutenberg Strasse, shut down. A vegetarian, she was deeply affected by this new development - and wrote a very moving email to me, sharing her woes with me, in characterstic Annika style! And as usual I was clapping my hands in glee at the way she put it! I had to share it with you - so here it is :-
I'm dead blue. The vegetable vendor in my block is no more.
Minute of silence.
He opened up in August and brought sunshine into my life:
fresh vegetables within a few steps of my house,
no more carrying of heavy loads across the whole city,
personal sale instead of self-take box, amounts according to my wishes
instead of prepacked portions --
I could buy a single carrot, okay,
that is possible at Real as well but only for bio veges
and they cost more.
Now he is no longer.
The sales in this small road with hardly any stores must have been to small.
The only chance was that the people visiting the bakery next door
would also frequent the veg store but I guess fewest of them did.
So he closed down.
Leaving behind a sad, vegless, paintorn Annika.
© Annika Schlee
Ain't she good? :-)
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11 comments:
Its always sad when the pleasant becomes the past.
A small chapter closed in your friends life paving way for newer adventures , a little more away from her home ! ( i sound like those online horoscope scribes)
;-)
know what? its so easy to forget what contributes to making our lives what they are... little nuances, little glimpses like this one into someone else's floods my mind with vivid images of all that i had unfortunately forgotten... :)
A very interesting eulogic thought.Really goood piece.
I do eat my vegetable you know.
Heheh..Sreekesh you're right...for a sec there I thought it was Linda Goodman writing that comment ;-) JK!
Nyassa - Welcome. You comment was so insightful. It's true, we forget the small things that truly make the difference in our lives and focus on the more inconsequential things that loom large in our vision.
Akshay - Good boy. Glad you eat your veggies ;-)
lucky veggie seller!!!!
;-) yea, she's good, geet!
yea, very good indeed.
incidentally, AVM?
Nice. Aah, the travails of being a vegeterian in a foreign land
Anon - prithee tell me, who be thee! AVM - yes very much, provided you're talking about AVM(J), the school!
Rahul - hehe...yeah she's damn good. I'm always grinning if not clapping my hands in glee and laughing, after reading her emails! :-)
Parth - I agree with you when you bemoan the hassles of being a "vegetarian in a foreign country", but Annika's a vegetarian in her own country! She prefers veggies over maas-machli...and cooks the most delicious food, including blue soup a la Bridget Jones Diary, yummy rice, and sambar-ish dal and veggies! :-)
She does put it very well. It is quite uncanny how things that we hardly notice sometimes become symbols and mean a lot to us. We only realise it when they are gone.
Ooh that was just halfwit little me.
Anon/Phal
Ah the light dawns as far as names r concerned - so Ms Anon is Ms Phal - but art thou also an AVMite? Since you tossed the question at me, I'm curious now...very much so :-)
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