Two words say it all. “Delicious simplicity.” No register. Cash and carry.

Paper bags to hold jewels polished by the farmer’s hands. A friendly face.

Produce that glitters like some pirate’s chest overrun with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and gold. From Mother Earth, as all gems are.

The roadside stand. May it

never make its last stand.

It might be two-by-fours cobbled together with a tin roof. It might be a pickup truck tailgate. It might be the overhang of an old store.

Whatever its form, nothing warms my heart like a roadside stand.

The steering wheel takes control. In I pull. I buy tomatoes. Peaches. A watermelon sounds good. Crooked neck squash? I’ll grill ’em with onions. Cukes? They’ll go with the maters and onions in my salad.

My off-the-grid wanderings cross paths with roadside stands year-round. In winter, they stand empty and stark. Wood frames pale like bleached bones. Abandoned and alone.

Early spring, you’ll see folks sprucing up things, getting ready for business. Summer transforms stands. Suddenly they radiate color and energy. Fall brings scup pernongs, pumpkins, and jars of honey full of liquefied sun.

Now many people are content to get produce at the big stores. At a roadside stand you see produce bathed in the sunlight that nurtured it. In a big store it’s laid out beneath fluorescent light. What a drag.

Progress changed things for some unlucky souls. As many became more citified, as more kids grew up far from farms, voila, fruit and vegetables magically appear.

A lot of people lost touch with what it takes to grow things. What’s behind splitoak baskets of peaches? Hard work, but how the work delights us.

Now don’t be surprised - shocked is the word - if you come across an untended roadside stand. The honor system is alive and well in farm country. Heroes of the soil trust you. Just bag your tomatoes and drop your money in the jar.

Roadside stands grow memories, too. On US 1 in Lexington County, South Carolina, a tractor sits next to a stand chock full of Mother Earth’s jewels.

My mind transforms that tractor into the mule that dragged a plow across granddad’s field rife with light green watermelons with dark green, zigzagged stripes. Put one in the cooler … Ok it’s icy now. Plunge a butcher knife in. Here the rift crackle like lightning as you split the melon. The red meat glistens, and up drifts a sweet fragrance. We eat it at once, and juice dribbles everywhere.

Farm to table is a lovely thing, and to me a roadside stand is an extension of unseen fields. Unless you grow your own maters and such, it’s as close to farming as you’ll get.

At a roadside stand, you won’t warm your hands in sun-baked dirt, and you won’t lean over to pluck some jewel from a furrow or stretch for a limb. You will, however, satisfy the desire to grow things that’s hardwired into our DNA.

I was telling a woman about the roadside stand you see here. She described an old screen-wire produce stand she had seen but then she paused so long I figured the call had dropped. Then, “I never met a roadside stand I didn’t like.”

Neither have I.