Last week on a very busy day--- my husband had customer visits he was handling by himself and I was running from factory to factory doing simultaneous interpreting for our QA Management consultant--- I had run out of carrots.

I’ve been drinking freshly juiced carrot juice, suggested by a doctor who wants to fix my digestion problems without resorting to Western Medicine (I’m all for that.)  It does help, but the jury’s still out on whether or not it’ll do the job by itself.  Anyway, I had run out of carrots and asked my bitch of a housekeeper (story for another day) to ask my neighbor if she had any of the organic carrots left (we had been sharing a bag).  If not, then she would need to buy some.

That night at 10:00 PM I came back and found in the sink waiting for me five of the most sorry carrots I have ever seen this side of a compost heap.  Shriveled, darkened, punky in spots and where they weren’t punky they would bend right over and then slowly straighten again when you let go.  I scraped one and then abandoned the lot, and the next morning didn’t have the carrot juice.  I didn’t even bother saying anything to the housekeeper.

That day I ran between our factories, interpreting, exhorting our shop supervisors and managers to get behind the program and get on board for real change.  I practiced all my marketing  and presentation and communication skills, in two languages, trying to build up steam in everyone for what will be a long process of change in the way our facilities work.  

I had been fretting, feeling my stomach going back to its old ways all day, and finally between the last seminar and a karaoke evening with the consultant (there was no dinner that night!), I managed to steal 20 minutes and buy some organic carrots.  While I was at the vegetable stand I saw some simply wonderful organic pickling cucumbers.  My husband loves those at breakfast—he eats them raw--- and they’re pretty rare in Southern China.  I got them.  Then when I got home at 10:00 that night, in the sink I found a bag of carrots.

My husband came in right after I did, and he stood in the kitchen door watching me peeling carrots and said, do you like the carrots?  

He had stopped at a market between meetings and dinner with customers, and had bought carrots for me.

It had been a hard 3 weeks of work for me and I was way tired and stressed, and I just dropped the peeler and hugged him.  Then I showed him the cucumbers.  He smiled slowly and said, “We did a Vegetable Exchange.”  

This is the man I’m married to.  I’m the luckiest woman in the world.