Zandstra From Memoir Journal Before she became a creative nonfiction writer and oral historian, teenaged Laura Zandstra helped her Indiana farming family sell produce at a weekly farmer’s market in Chicago. With impressionistic strokes, she evokes the market day experience as seen from behind the scales and cash register. Chicago at four a.m. smells like two hundred years of dirt and one hundred years of oil and gasoline spilled on pavement and then congealed in the dew before daylight. About that time on Saturday mornings, our 1979 Mercedes truck pulled into the high school parking lot at 29th and King Drive, thirty miles from our Indiana fields, and eight of us would tumble out into the darkness, throw open the rear roll-up door, and set to work unloading our wares. The cabbages were in fifty pound boxes that, try as I might, I could not heave off the back of the truck by myself. The beans were in square wooden crates, the green onions in fancy waxed cartons with pictures on them. We bought the green onions from our neighbors, the DeJong brothers.
