Bob, who is in his 70s and has been part of our farm for a decade, had the eye and experience to recognize that the cherries were ripening early—just in time for the end of school. Katie, who is 6 and full of energy, showed up with several of her friends an hour after their teachers dismissed them for the summer.

We spread old sheets around the base of our massive cherry tree. Rachel and Ascher, both middle-schoolers, deftly climbed toward the top of the tree, shaking branches as they went, creating a downpour of fruit for Katie and me to rescue. Susanne picked from atop a ladder, and Bob from the bed of his pick-up truck, lifting Katie from time to time to snatch the cherries that were otherwise out of reach. We worked up a good sweat and—despite how many cherries went into the mouths of the pickers—filled six gallon jugs, before quitting to share lunch in the treehouse and tell stories about the great harvest.

Some of the cherries went home with the pickers, and some went with me to a church meeting that night. A quart made its way to an elderly neighbor who has been ill, and several more appeared at our Friday afternoon tailgate market.

The market began a few years ago behind our fire station/community center, and now takes over the parking lot of a nearby church. Sally is there each week with her homemade soap, scented with lavender and peppermint. Bob sells the elegant wooden spoons he crafts from walnut and maple trees that have fallen on our property.

The Clarks are under a canopy with their homemade chocolates—the best around (high praise coming from someone who spent her childhood in Hershey, Pennsylvania). John and Maureen are selling yarn and socks made of wool from their alpacas, who roam the farm adjacent to ours. Students from the nearby college hawk their grain-fed beef, and a multitude of local farmers display their organic produce.

While Susie and her friends jam on banjos and fiddles, neighbors share updates on 86-year-old Mary’s health and progress reports on the work being done to repair our road. We exchange news of newborn calves, recent black-bear sightings, and the wanderings of our pesky resident wild-turkey flock.

Surveying the scene last Friday, I thought of the quote hanging over my dining room table: “Upon hearing that most women in the United States have water piped into their homes, a woman from Nigeria grew somber, and said, ‘How do the women speak to each other? If we didn’t talk at the village well, we wouldn’t know about our lives.’” The tailgate market is our village well.

Bent-over Earl and his deaf wife, Nellie, whose ancestors settled this mountain cove around the time of the American Civil War, often sell out at the market first. Their beans are pale and tough, their carrots knobby and gnarled, their potatoes puny and pocked. Their vegetables get bought up first, not because of beauty or flavor, but because everyone knows that the couple depends on selling their produce to survive.

Nothing touches me more about this community of neighbors than their covert compassion to Nellie and Earl. It is an investment that everybody knows will pay off if they ever find themselves on the needing end of life’s circumstances.

In the meantime, the young will keep bringing their energy and the old their experience, the harvests will be cheerfully brought in, and gifts of food and craft and music will burst forth among us, as we celebrate our connection and need for one another.