Where winter comes gentle as the rising tide, the La Mesa Farmers Market unfolds like a drowsy afternoon dream. The locals call 67 degrees "cool," and maybe it is, by their standards, yet they wander the stalls in shorts and T-shirts. There's something about these market-days that feels like a memory – the kind where the edges are soft but the feeling stays with you, warm as sunlight on skin.

It's was just past three o'clock and the sun was beginning to hide behind the palm trees when I found Karl the Poet — almost shirtless and mystical as a desert prophet, his skyblue typewriter perched before him like an altar. A true desert ascetic he accepts my five dollars, a bit below his suggested pricing, and crafted me a poem about why trees have so many leaves. "I like it", he says, he vibing. I ask, "Do you consider your self a mystical guy?". Karl pauses and entertains my questions, "My feet right here on this concrete," he told me, "they tune into the Earth beneath the concrete, and I know that the Earth is still holding me." He's been crafting poems for strangers for six or seven months now, tapping out what he calls "linguistic medicine from his celestial heart." Some folks ask him for silly verses; others pour out their deepest griefs, like the woman who lost her son under a tree. It's a rare profession full of meaning and sincerity.

Instagram @astrotheosis

Down the way, Matt from The Brulee Bar was torching sugar tops on a hundred different flavors of crème brulee, each one a little flavor revelation against vanilla orthodoxy. His path wound from restaurant management through the Cordon Bleu in Paris, but it took the pandemic's empty kitchens and the support of his family to push him toward this sweet enterprise. His biggest seller? "Brown butter cinnamon," he told me, though I reckon the lemongrass Thai chili might be the one that shows his culinary school pedigree.

Instagram @thebruleebar

Jacob at Down to Ferment was working his first sales job with the enthusiasm of youth, hawking hot sauce with names that made me blush. "I'll say it – sex sells," he grinned, "but also funny jokes sell as well." He spoke of ghost peppers and habaneros with the reverence older folks reserve for fine wine. The hot sauce is delicious but I think Jacob could probably sell anesthesia to a man in a coma.

Instagram @down2ferment

Website down2ferment.com

I found Alex of Garden Party CS selling shrubs – not the kind you plant, but drinking vinegars that tell a story of organic fruits and apple cider vinegar, Cocktail Shrubs!. She started small, learning as she went. "I'm not really a business person," she confessed, but sometimes the best businesses start that way, just doing the next right thing, until you look up one day and find yourself in Anthropologie at the mall or the posh Shelter Island resort Kona Kai. These are just the kind of opportunities that arise while making products with integrity.

Instagram @gardenparty.cs

website gardenpartyshrubs.com

The La Mesa Farmer's Market exists in that strange space between seasons, where time feels fluid and winter is more of a whispered rumor than a reality. Here in this gentle twilight between seasons, summer lingers like a pleasant dream and winter never quite arrives and the market exists between warm smiles and the cool of the setting sun – a place where community happens one sample, one conversation, one torched dessert at a time. The kind of place that feels like a memory even while you're still making it.