I just wanted to buy some tomatoes. To help me deal with the fact that my own much-awaited, assiduously-farmed, miraculously still-alive heirlooms back home would be ripening while I was out of town.

But the Lunenberg farmer’s market has so much more. Seriously. It’s amazing. People plan their weeks around it. And you can see why. I want to live there. In it. I want to climb up onto one of those farm stands, wrap myself in a hand-loomed table cloth, and sleep with my head on a bed of brightly veined, full-leafed Swiss chard.

You wouldn’t believe the colors. Vivid. Saturated. A technicolor explosion compared to the sepia tones of our markets back home. It’s like Oz, but with beet greens. And no little people. Or few. I don’t know. I wasn’t looking for them.

Anyway. Then the produce. It’s marvelous. Not just its hue but — let’s use a dog show term, here — its conformation. Perfect. Ample. Shapely. Unscarred. Unblemished. Like the produce you’d see in a commercial for…produce. Or on the table of a God. Or someone very rich. Like Tom Cruise. He’s a little person! He would shop here. So would his alien overseer. Anyway. And it’s all organic. All of it! I don’t know how they do it. I get that Canadians are nicer than us, but so nice that the bugs give them a pass? It seems so.

And frankly? They should get a pass. Because you know what? Canadians are nicer than us. They’re better. They are — athletics excepted, perhaps — a more evolved species. A farmer’s market filled with them is a calm, fetching, harmonious affair. No one elbows you to get ahead on the pupusa line. No one glares at your child for dawdling, or yells at you to “move that fucking stroller.” No one hogs an entire table to drink their single machiatto and read the L.A. Weekly while you stand with your child, laden with bags, dying of dehydration, unable to eat, cooking in the sun, being attacked by flies. There are also no flies (see above). And no hipsters. No fedoras. No irony. It is utterly irony-free. Like Sade, but not horrible.

I love it here. If I could only convince my husband to move…but he says all the kids in Nova Scotia become meth heads. And I think he may be right.

Except for the ones who work at the farmers market. I still say if we lived there we’d be fine.