From the Editor’s Desk

There’s a gravel lot in a town I know that is nothing at all for eleven months. It has a chain across the entrance and a real-estate sign that has been promising something since before the sign faded. Then, the day after Thanksgiving, a man from Oregon pulls in with a flatbed, and by dark there are four hundred Christmas trees leaning on sawhorses, a string of bulbs, a trailer with a space heater in it, and a hand-lettered board that says what a foot of noble fir costs this year.

He is there for twenty-six days. He knows which families will stand in the cold for forty minutes arguing about six inches, and he knows that the price he can get on the first Saturday is not the price he can get on the twenty-third, and that on the twenty-sixth a Christmas tree is firewood with tinsel on it. He told me once that he makes his whole year in that lot and has never seen the town in daylight in any other month. In January there are needles in the gravel and a pale square where the trailer stood.

Everybody who sells for a living has a week like that, or a day, when the whole year shows up at once and has to be said yes or no to before it leaves. And speaking of which: this week’s three stories are all set at the top of the year. In Mexico City, in the last days of October, a family that sells marigolds has sold everything but the forty stems that were never for sale. On the road into Half Moon Bay, on the Saturday of the Pumpkin Festival, an honor box that has worked fine for ten years meets three hundred strangers and one neighbor. And in Dakar, on the last night before Tabaski, a herder with eleven sheep left holds his price while a man in a borrowed jacket keeps coming back with a smaller one. Read them, and then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Money-Changer — a conversion happens at the changer’s booth, and something crosses a boundary to do it.)

— The Editor