Small Days it still on my mind - Market Day

When I was around the age of 11 and 12 my grandmother would send my brother and I to the local open air market to buy much needed groceries, fresh fruits, fresh meat and vegetables and yams, Fresh, Fresh vegetables. This was done mostly on Saturdays, we would walk from my home in Hadfield street to Bourda Market green. I was never happy with the thought of marketing but I love going to the market, there was so much to see on the way and mind you for a 12 year old it was a long walk. The route to the market was very interesting. I would walk from the Hadfield Street through John Street then into South Road into Bourda Street across busy Regent Street into the market. On the way we would stop to see what was floating in the South Road Canal, and could find a few interesting things in there; every so often we would see a dead animal, a car or someone flip flop going down the canal it was always dirty and smelly. At the corner of South Road and Bourda we would always stop at the coconut man to enjoy the oh so refreshing coconut water. Then I would walk along Bourda Street which ran the full length of the Bourda cemetery where the vagrants’ live among the old tombs rot and rust. There were many stories behind this cemetery and my great grandmother told us that those buried in this cemetery died from the Spanish plague, I am not sure if it was the truth and have never learn the true story about this cemetery.

Sometimes we would stop just outside the market to watch the vendor's kids play a game of marble called “Gam” played mostly by boys and instead of marbles these little boys would use the awarra seeds used after eating awarra a fruit indigenous to Guyana. Sometimes my brother would participate in a game. My grandmother timed our going to market so we had a particular time in which to be back home, we had been a trouble before so we knew not to mess with her timing. So off to the special vendors she shopped from, checking our shopping list to make sure that we had everything she asked for. My favorite part of the market was stopping to taste the “taste and buy genip” moving from genip vendor to vendor until you found the sweetest ones to buy. Once everything was in the rice bags (shopping bags made from the jute bags used to store rice) we were on our way back home, but by then the scenes of our trip to the market was not fun anymore because the bags were so heavy and digging into our skins that all we wanted to do was get home.