Crate Expectations

Johan's apartment was a little Swedish haven in the heart of downtown Manhattan -- all white walls, extremely sparse and airy.  But he was using these overturned crates as coffee tables out in the living room that looked impossibly familiar, so familiar they made my heart ring.  Could they be?  They couldn't be, could they?  I pointed them out to him.

ME: Those look like farmer's market crates.

JOHAN: Yeah, that's where I got them.

ME: From who?  Do you remember?

JOHAN: Yeah, from a guy on the, let's see...west side of the market, in the middle.  He sold them to me, I think they were $15, maybe $20 each.

Which means they absolutely had to be from the Paffenroths of Paffenroth Gardens at the Union Square Greenmarket.  My first job in New York was helping the Paffenroths sell vegetables at their stand.  Not only were they my first employer in New York, but they're also like my east coast parents.  Isn't it crazy that Johan was using some of the Paffenroths' crates as decoration in his house?  Maybe that's not crazy to anyone but me, but it was CRAZY to me.

I heard Ilse Crawford speak about emotional design over the summer.  She said that having a piece with history in your home brings life to a space in a way that no new object can.  She showed  slides of Mathias Dahlgren's restaurant in Stockholm's Grand Hotel, which I had been to, and talked about the 300-year-old tables with uneven legs.  The souls of meals past etched deep in the heart of the wood can have an effect on the meals eaten on them today.

Of course, I understood in theory.  But before this weekend, I've never had an interior object resonate with me so intensely before.  Here were these familiar crates in an unfamiliar downtown Scandinavian loft, among white cabinets and in front of a flat screen TV.  Here, they were clean, worn, weathered and beautiful objets that echoed the slightly uneven planks of the loft's painted floor.  They have a story of their own, but they also figure strongly in my personal history.

I spent my first few years in New York lifting, loading and emptying those wooden crates at the Greenmarket.  I know their exact width and weight in my arms.  I know the way the slats feel when they're moist with water and caked with the black dirt of Orange County.  I know how three can stack perfectly together in a little latticed package, and I know the particular clacking sound they make when they're stacked together at the end of the day. 

I've seen them packed with dewy red radishes at 6am, the green leaves cushioned in the center of two red stripes.  I've seen them full of beet tops and carrot greens and hacked onion stalks, ready to be put on the truck and carted back to the farm for compost.  I've sat on many of those crates to eat my egg sandwich after the rush of morning customers was gone; I've rested my tired feet on them, waiting for the tents to be put away for the evening.

Alex has told me that he's sold the crates to people in the past for $20, enough to cover the cost of the materials.  But he talks about selling those crates with the same bemused tone that he has when he talks about people buying purslane, which he grew up thinking was a weed, a nuisance.  But it was with some pride that he told me, and I told Johan, that crates with the initials PP carved into them (which one of Johan's has) were made by Alex's grandfather, Peter Paffenroth, and might be 100 years old.
 
There's something thrilling about the idea that these very simple objects, just nails and wood, which may have passed through my own hands, are finding new life in a totally unrelated place. And yet it's also ashes to ashes -- those crates have survived Peter Paffenroth, but who knows how long they'll have a place in Johan's home.  It was a wonderful wink and smile from my own past.  And now I want to tell Ilse Crawford, hey, I totally get it.