Every Friday the vendors come to Blackstone Street in Boston. They come with their trucks, their tables and their tarps and hundreds of crates of fresh vegetables and fruit. As the sun rises, they prepare for a long day's work.

Whenever I walk through Haymarket on a Friday, I feel like I’ve stepped back in time. It’s not the kind of place you could ever hurry through. The crowd is thick and the sights and sounds and smells draw you into their chaotic embrace.

Outside the Bostonian Hotel on North Street are the first tables, heavy with clusters of tiny, green finger bananas, deep red vine-ripe tomatoes and pyramids of mangos and oranges. A chubby little boy chases his sister around the table and their mother tells them to be still as she hands two pounds of asparagus to an elderly Indian woman clad in a colorful sari. 

“$1.50 please.”

I turn onto Blackstone Street and the crowd thickens. Fresh strawberries are crushed on the sidewalk. An onion rolls by. The sweet smell of fresh summer berries mingles with cigar smoke, a clean waft of fresh cilantro, then the sharp bite of cumin. There are mountains of plantains, shiny red peppers and sweet summer corn, a husk pulled down on one to reveal plump rows of butter and sugar kernels.

The melodies of a vibrant mix of different languages fill the air. 

“Platanos,” says a young Hispanic woman to an Asian vendor.

“Cuanto?” he asks her, not missing a beat.

There is such a warm, exotic sense of community here.

“Next!” yells a well-muscled Italian man in a sweat-stained wife beater.

I dodge a deep pothole cradling a crushed pink grapefruit and approach a display of globe grapes the size of cherry tomatoes. They’re deep purple and kissed with a sugary frost. The sky-blue tarp is more sunken here and it grazes the top of my head. A lime bounces past my left foot, propelled by the wheel of an oncoming cart pushed by a Muslim woman with a baby on her back.

To my left, steep stone stairs lead down to the fish store. A plywood crate brims with blue crabs. Hungry flies dart about. An aluminum shelf is covered with piles of fat purple, gray cherrystones. The air is heavy and pungent with the smell of fish mingled with sweat and sawdust. Another plywood crate is filled with snow crabs. I pick one up, but it doesn’t move. I try another but they all seem lifeless. I am approached by the proprietor, a tall swarthy man clad in a dirty white apron smeared with blood and fish scales.

“Can I help you, lady?”

“Do you have any live crabs?” I ask him.

“They alive,” he protests, kicking the crate. One crab trembles in a post-mortem seizure and he quickly points to it.

“See?!” he says excitedly.

I smile.

He picks up another crab and holds it upside down in the palm of his hand with his fingers under the legs. He wiggles his fingers and the legs move. 

“See Honey, they alive. They just tired because it’s so hot in here. They don’t like the heat.”

I’m not convinced, but I am amused. I tell him I’ll take three. He puts them in a charcoal gray plastic bag and charges me $5.00. I emerge back into the main market and walk past the cheese man. Bags of aromatic spices hang on a rack next to five gallon jars filled with pepperocinis, Spanish, calamata and oil cured olives. Fresh cheeses rest in a bin of ice next to a stack of plastic milk crates overflowing with bags of freshly-baked breads.

I kick a kumquat as I walk past the last table before the next corner. It overflows with melons, squashes, green onions, plum tomatoes and blackberries.

I turn the corner and emerge onto the street of the fish people. Long aluminum tables are laden with ice and covered with an abundance of fresh seafood. The first table boasts a thick stack of bright red salmon filets, rows of delicate, pink red snapper and octopus. The next table offers shrimp with their heads still on, shiny black mussels in blue net bags and neat rows of littlenecks and oysters. A lemon rolls between my feet. The air smells of ocean and citrus, sweat and summer. I make my way to the cherrystone man’s cart. Freshly shucked pink clams bathe in their cold, sweet, briny liquor-filled shells on a bed of ice between stars of sunny lemon wedges.

“Can I get six to take home, please?”

“One dozen--five dollars,” he replies.

“Okay.”

He fills a blue plastic bag while counting under his breath. I take my heavy bag and retrace my path. I step on a grape. A pretty Hispanic woman walks past me with a baby girl on her back. The child has fat brown cheeks, tiny gold earrings and big, happy, sparkling brown eyes. She reaches out and tugs at a lock of my hair and I giggle. I approach the last tables and get two pounds of vine ripened tomatoes and bunch of fresh basil. I pay $3.00 and cross the street, emerging back into the present until next Friday.

Author's Biography

Christine Casoli lives in a faux tropical paradise overlooking scenic downtown Melrose, Massachusetts, with her pet goldfish, Fishie Swa. 

By day she is a relatively mild-mannered office worker and career criminal, specializing in heinous crimes of fashion. At night she journals obsessively, lights sparklers, blows bubbles, burns candles, and dances wildly about. 

She is a Music Editor at Christine Casoli lives in a faux tropical paradise overlooking scenic downtown Melrose, Massachusetts with her pet goldfish, Fishie Swa. 

By day she is a relatively mild-mannered office worker and career criminal, specializing in heinous crimes of fashion. At night she journals obsessively, lights sparklers, blows bubbles, burns candles, and dances wildly about. 

She is a Music Editor at Nights And Weekends. Founder of the Felon Fan Club, she lives to write and loves to write wherever she goes. 

E-mail Christine. 

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