Chapter Seven: The last Sunday market run

It ended the way most big things in life seem to, quietly, on an otherwise ordinary morning, with none of us realising at the time that we were living through a last.

There was no final big Sunday celebration. No big farewell, no big announcement, no chance to properly mark almost twenty years of crates and customers and 2:30am starts. The only goodbye that happened at all was smaller than that, close hugs exchanged quietly between us and our dear loyal customers, market stall neighbours, and friends we'd made along the way, the kind of embrace that says more than any speech could. It was simply a Sunday like hundreds before it, and then, not long after, it wasn't ours to have anymore. The stall our parents had run for the better part of nearly two decades, the one that had fed our family and half-raised every one of us kids in its own way, the one that financially paid of their home, came to an end.

We won't pretend we fully understood, in the moment, the size of what had just happened. It took time, weeks, honestly, maybe longer, for the absence of it to really land. No early alarm on a Sunday. No crates to load. No regulars to greet. Nearly twenty years of rhythm, gone, and a strange, unfamiliar quiet sitting in its place.

For our parents, we imagine it was something closer to grief. Not just the loss of an income, though that mattered enormously too, but the loss of a community they had spent almost two decades quietly building, one Sunday morning at a time. The regulars who'd watched us grow up. The familiar faces who'd return year after year for the same batch of freshly harvested bok choi or mulberries growing in our backyard, the same conversation, the same small kindness. All of it, in its old form, simply over.

But our parents have never been people who stay still for long, and they didn't here either.

Within a relatively short time, they'd found another way forward, not running their own stall anymore, but becoming farmers producing their own produce to share with the community and living of the land and what they harvested that day. A different role, quieter in some ways, but one that let them keep doing the one thing they'd always known, growing good produce.

It wasn't the same. We don't think any of us would pretend it was. But it was theirs, built again from very little, the same way almost everything in our parents' lives has been built, not from a grand plan, but from simply continuing to show up, in whatever form showing up was still possible.

We've thought a lot, since starting Norwynd, about what it means to lose something you've poured almost twenty years into and still find a way to keep going. Our parents never sat us down and explained their philosophy on resilience. They just lived it, over and over, from a refugee camp in Thailand to a cold Melbourne flat in Fitzroy to an empty modest home in Queensland to a market stall by the seaside bay in Manly to its sudden end.

It's not a lesson we learned from a book, even with all those encyclopedias. It's one we learned simply by watching two people refuse to stop so their children could have a brighter and better future than they ever did.