DASE: Driftless Area Stock Exchange

No fishing last few days. A bit of thinking though as I approached home today after work and began to inventory the items that needed transport from my vehicle to the house. I had through the course of the day received these items from a couple folks:

(1) A giant jar of honey, raised and harvested in the Cannon River basin.
(2) One compass plant (made famous by Aldo Leopold in his story of the acute angle in the cemetery).
(3) Several golden alexanders - native prairie plants.
(4) A pair of pink squirrel earrings I'd given to someone - she brought them to me, requesting repairs to the tails (ha!).
(5) One copy of Grass Roots - a wonderful book I'd loaned.
(6) An empty jar that formerly held some of our grape jelly made last fall.

Not pictured are the bergamot plants I brought with me this morning and left with someone in swap fashion.

This reminded me of something Steve at Oak Center said in the prelude to the Greg Brown concert last month: [para-phrasing] Why do we judge our condition by the Dow Jones Industrial Average? What does it mean when the stock market falls? Can't we judge our state by looking around at the fields and considering how much rain we've got and how our gardens our doing? Isn't true wealth to be found in our relationships with friends and family?

Just a little, seemingly insignificant deal here, but on further look: maybe a microcosm of a stock exchange of sorts - the kind of exchange we ought to be having more often.