The Scale That Weighed the Dog
At the Saturday market my squash scale read sixty pounds because my dog Pickles climbed up on the platform for a quiet midmorning nap.
I sell vegetables at the Saturday farmers market every week from May until the first frost. My stand has a striped awning, a chalkboard sign and a heavy iron scale I inherited from my grandmother. It is accurate to the quarter ounce. At least it was until the day my dog Pickles got involved.
Pickles is a nine-year-old Australian shepherd with the build of an ottoman. She comes to market with me because I cannot stand to leave her home alone, and she spends the morning under the table, watching people's ankles. That Saturday, she decided to sleep on the scale platform. It was a warm morning, the metal had caught the sun, and she turned around three times and flopped.
I was busy with a customer. A woman in a sun hat asked for a pound of tomatoes. I reached for the scale and saw, to my astonishment, that the needle had swung all the way to sixty. 'Ma'am,' I said, 'I believe these tomatoes weigh a great deal.' She looked at the needle. She looked at my face. She looked down, and her whole expression changed.
By then a small crowd had gathered. A man selling honey two tables over laughed so hard he had to sit down. A little boy asked if the scale could be used to weigh his cat, and the woman in the sun hat insisted on buying a pound of squash 'at Pickles prices.' I charged her for sixty pounds as a joke, and she paid it, and then I refunded her and gave her an extra tomato for being a good sport.
We kept going. Pickles slept through it all. The story spread through the market faster than a coupon, and by noon every vendor had stopped by to check the scale and ask after the new manager. I have always thought a stand like mine is worth a trip to farm money pages for the pricing tips, but nobody mentions the part where the dog sets the rate. I told it on farm.FM and the comments said Pickles deserved a raise.
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