I have found a new place to buy spinach. I do not realize I am looking for spinach until I find it. I bump into a styrofoam box full of spinach by the vegetable stall in a back alley that doesn’t get much foot traffic. The occasional granny. The occasional helper. Now the occasional me. I pass through this alley most days, mentally noting that they sell grapefruit on my way to breakfast, sleepy, hangry. Always forgetting the grapefruit on my way home, energized, busy. But today I grab a fistful of spinach. It’s fresh and so much cheaper than the packaged refrigerated spinach I normally buy from the other shop on the corner of main street. This spinach makes a crunch. This spinach still has dirt between its leaves.
As I line up to pay, I think about the chop when you separate the leaves from the stems. All in one go. Deeply satisfying. The man sitting on a kid’s stool surrounded by potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, winter melon, spring onion, choy sum, yams, onions, and tomatoes weighs my spinach. How did he get down there, I wonder. Does he assume the position and then they pack the vegetables around him? Or is he just a very precise jumper? Either way, he must have a very good eye. The needle of the scale twangs into a position of imperceptible difference. I have been watching the other vegetables weighed before me. All different prices though. The man sitting on the kid’s stool looks up at me excited. He wears wire-frame sunglasses, askew. Six dollars, he chirps. A bird in a nest of vegetables. That is what I think about as I walk home to chop my spinach for lunch.