I opened my last jar of applesauce this morning. It may not seem like such an important event—I know what you’re thinking—you can go to Wal-mart and buy another jar for a dollar or less. But it wouldn’t be my homemade super-cinnamon sauce made from the organic Colorado-grown apples that I picked out ever so carefully from the Pearl Street farmers’ market. Grabbing a jar from the Wal-mart shelf will never bring to mind the beautiful bike ride through drifting autumn leaves, Riona in the trailer singing to her Barbie, a bike trail that eliminates all traffic and weaves its way through the city I love, and the arrival at the tented block that holds everything my heart desires. If I were rich, if I had all the money I ever wanted to spend, I would never buy a mansion or a Lamborghini—I think I just might spend it all, week after week, at the farmers’ market.

There you can buy almost everything you need. Fresh baked pies from the berries grown in the Wash Park community garden. Beef from eastern Colorado raised by ranchers who have replaced their corn with native prairie grasses, saving the earth, our health, and our economy with each delectable bite. Handcrafted soaps whose “factories” don’t require regulatory trips from the state environmental inspectors. In the spring, green onions, spinach and snow peas that crack when you snap them in half and can please any three-year-old who gets a taste handed to him from a basket in the arms of the farmer. In the summer, peaches and tomatoes that will fill in the absence of every meal and every remaining jar in the storage room. There will be peach cobbler, peach pie, peaches and ice cream, fresh peaches dripping juice down our chins. There will be tomato panini on fresh-baked homemade French bread, homemade sauce on homemade pizza, tomatoes to mix with the greens we bought today to make the salad that all the girls love.

And when the harvest really comes in, during the end-of-summer and early-fall months? We will stock up on winter squashes, filling our pantry with butternut and acorn and pumpkins that will make soups and stews and casseroles and pies that will fill our holiday tables with more than just warmth. They will complete a meal that would otherwise have forgotten its roots.

Any day of the market, you can buy Colorado wines, fresh-baked gourmet breads, hand-made pastas, even jewelry or candles. But what brings me there, what makes my heart yearn from week to week, is the crisp taste of the autumn air on my tongue that will soon linger with the crisp taste of a Swiss Gourmet, Jonathan, or Gala. I will eat them every day for months, I will cut them, chop them up in my processor, Riona will help pour the unmeasured insanity of cinnamon in, and we will remember the joys of this time, this life cycle of food, until the moment comes when the last jar is empty, and nothing can replace it but tears on my cheeks and a longing for fall.