The Beet Lady

Sonia Fenske

Have you heard of the beet lady? Do you know where she’s gone? “She’s been missing” said the news, floating about by ear and mouth. A woman with lines forming valleys across her face, a familiar appearance at my Sunday morning market. Her eyes have cataracts clouding them over and obscuring her sight. Though, this didn’t stop her from truly seeing.

Her dwelling rests on the cliffs near the edge of my cobbled streets, over that grassy lump near the sea, a secluded cottage with just herself and her sweet beets. The beet lady grew those beets up on the cliffs. While she tilled she sunk her bare feet in to the moist dirt where the beets grew. She’d raise her head only to look out at the sea, watching the waves and rocking back and forth: waiting, wanting, and yearning. Those waves eat away at the heart of the rock along these cliffs, where the lilacs fade into long strands of green, dusting the crumbling ridges. This is where the beet lady lived, alone with her beets. Do you know where she’s gone?

She’d walk towards my clustered shops every Sunday, to sell her sweet beets. Sweet, succulent beets. Customers passed and bought her cooked beets, ate them right there on the spot, the blood red juice dripped down chins and stained white teeth and collared shirts. If you bought a beet from the beet lady, she’d tell you about their assorted weights, bristly outer skin, and juicy red innards. “Almost like faces” she’d say. Week after week, the beet lady hobbled to my market, to tell you about those beets, though as she spoke she’d never look you straight in the eye. Her eyes constantly searched the air around your head, flicking back and forth as if you were a ghost floating somewhere in front of her.

She sold all of her beets cooked and raw, save one. This one beet, she left in the front pocket of her wool sweater. Everyone saw it there, with its green leaves springing out of the side of her pocket. A bush of green lined with red veins, raw. She carried this beet for weeks in her sweater, as if when she uprooted it and brushed the dirt away, the sight of the beet had plucked at her aching heart.

People say that she was jilted at the altar, forsaken by her beloved for a curiosity of the sea. He told her he’d be back one day. She was young when they first locked eyes at the local market. Barely fifteen, she was the town’s first-place winner of the annual Leafy Green Growing award. Promise seeped from her green thumb. He had been the son of the best local fisherman, winner of the Fresh Fins and Fish award. His fine love for the sea and her talents in the garden were thought to be perfect complements. However, in a lifetime, you can only have one true love. He did tell her he would come back. Everyone thought that they would end up in the local newspaper sixty years from their wedding day, the oldest couple in town. But as it’s been said, you can only have one true love; a choice must have been made between the fish of the sea and her leafy greens.
He left her three beet seeds in an envelope. That was it. No return address, no note, just three beet seeds. She became the beet lady with her sweet beets. Do you know where she’s gone?

Last people saw of her she was beet-less, no green leaves in her pocket. Some say she threw that beet out over the grassy cliffs out into the ocean, or that or it slipped from her fingers while she was looking at its bristly outer skin. Others say that she dropped the beet into her daily stew, tired of its weighty reminder. Oh, she did grow the most sweet, succulent beets. Last I’d seen of the beet lady, she was walking past, no beet in her pocket. She stopped and brought those scarred whitish blue eyes to my clustered streets and colored doors. She gripped a flyer “National Contest: Start Growing” and held my gaze, eye’s alight. “I’m done. Done waiting.” she said. Then the beet lady left, skipped town. Do you know where she’s gone?