It is there that Diogenes with his lantern, eternally seeking the honest man, may sigh with relief and whisper, "Mission accomplished."

My recent visit to the State Farmers Market was, even on a sizzling day, like a cool dipper of water from a mountain spring.

The easy, open language of rural America with its regional twang returned me to a farm boy's lore of things loved and, for the most part, lost.

Blackberries are back. Last summer friend Lou Rosser, charged with making a blackberry cobbler for her writing group's potluck dinner, was told that a virus had wiped out most of the blackberry crop.

Curious, she went home and typed "blackberry virus" into her computer, only to be rewarded with a plethora of technical stuff on how to avoid the affliction that victimizes the hand-held computer. Ah, lost, lost.

At a display of beautiful red tomatoes, I explained to the vendor that I had been disappointed in previous purchases of almost tasteless tomatoes.

"Well, sir, these are as good as they get," she said, busily putting out more of the red globes. "We just finished a revival at my church. After the preacher tasted one of my tomatoes he stayed on two extra days till enough ripened for him to take two cases home to the mountains!"

In the South, religion permeates our lives well beyond the church door. On a previous visit to the market, I was attracted to a display of honey under a hand-lettered sign advertising "Blessed Bees Honey."

Inquiring about "blessed bees," I was told, "Mister, surely you remember how in the Bible John the Baptist lived off bee honey and locusts while wandering in the wilderness. They was blessed bees."

I thought of what the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy once said after buying a load of firewood that contained a scribbled note advising him to "Have faith in the Lord and your fellow man."

The senator urged his wood-burning friends to "Buy only oak, be warned of philosophical wood sellers and shun those who also offer religion with the wood, especially with mixed wood."

"Three dollars a pound! Have mercy, ma'am," I exclaimed to the farmer's wife selling German Johnson tomatoes, a favorite variety at double the price of others.

With typical rural independence, she replied tartly, "Take 'em or leave 'em."

I took a couple and was not disappointed.

Choosing a watermelon for my visiting grandson, I was thumping some to test for ripeness.

"You don't thump 'em," said the melon lady. "You look at the stem. If it's dry, it's over-ripe. Won't last a week. Always look for the green stem."

From childhood, I remembered the opposite: Green stem, green melon. Nevertheless, the ground rules have changed. The melon was perfect.

Continuing along the line, I searched to no avail, for Peaches and Cream corn that friends Sid and Rachel Eagles recently introduced to us. It is a yellow and white blend of the popular Silver Queen and another sweet variety. It was the rage in Surry County a decade or so ago.

"Was this corn pulled yesterday?" I asked the young girl at the Silver Queen corn truck, thinking I'd trick her into the truth. Smart shoppers buy only corn picked in the morning dew on the day it's brought to market.

"No! It was pulled in barely daylight this morning!" she replied indignantly.

Her spirited retort reminded me of a previous visit when, like Diogenes, I was seeking the last acid tomato.

Meaning variety, I asked the teenager staffing the vegetable stand, "What are these?"

With an "Oh, Lord, how dumb can these city people get?" look, she said, incredulously, "Mister, they're 'maters!"

Not all at the teeming market were searching for German Johnson 'maters or Peaches and Cream corn. Many, like me, were subconsciously searching for the yesterdays that linked them to the land.

In "Gone with the Wind," a war-weary Scarlett cries out to her father in despair, "I hate Tara!"

"Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O'Hara, that Tara, that land doesn't mean anything to you?" he says angrily. "Why, land's the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts."

Amid the gathering clouds of economic hard times ahead, we realize as perhaps never before the truth of Gerald O'Hara's pronouncement. It is and always will be the land that sustains us.

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