Santa Cruz slows you down. Around 9 at night, I start scratching at the walls, the everything starts to shut down, especially out in Soquel where my parents live. But mornings are different.

I was out at the farmers market this morning. Gorgeous spinach, and broccolli are a given at farmers markets this time of year. But the tables and tables of beautiful, glistening mushrooms, shittake, oysters, boar heards, are clearly so fresh I doubt if the people who picked them have slept. And they smell so good, its a cliche to say mushrooms smell earthy, but they do, you feel like you could be out in the garden double digging a bed. Its enough to make you want to drop it all (cities, politics, computers) and go join John Jeavons on his farm. There are four tables of flowers, iris, sweet peas, a few orchids, and everythere there are proteas.

Proteas everywhere? Big spiky flowers, in fleshy pinks, famous for smelling like rotting flesh (though these don’t seem to have any scent at all) They remind me of when I lived in Cape Town, and hiking around Table Mountain, and walking the 10 blocks to spend an afternoon in Kirstenbosch.

But what are proteas, native only to the Cape, doing in such proliferations in a California farmers’ market, some 14,000 miles away?