I’m told there was a time children played outside.  I don’t mean a time they were driven to soccer at the appointed hour, but rather a time we let a child walk out the door and look for friends, for games, or maybe just for a spot under a Southern Elm.

Deep in an affluent Miami suburb, a small food market still remembers that time.  Children in the neighborhood usually travel in style – in the back of mom’s Range Rover, often with several different DVDs running and blinking from the headrests, one for each kid.

But at the Wayside Market, they don’t even have walls. And the kids love it.  The market keeps all the neighborhood children’s names on file, and they come on bikes, skates, boards, leftover floats from King Mango, and charge their ice cream to mom and dad. On school-day afternoons, they sit together on the shady benches in the front, like generations have before them, long before Steve Jobs taught us how empty and horrible our lives had been without AngryBirds.

The market has two functions: fun food and drink for neighborhood children, and farm-fresh produce for their parents.  The market doesn’t just buy from local farms; they buy from local backyards, as in Aunt Mildred’s avocados from her tree on 93rd Street.

Look for Victor, in particular in the summer, when he’ll cheerfully walk you through all the varieties of mango they have on display.  He’ll even buy some off you if you can put together a box of the best. If you have access to a fridge while you’re in town, ask him to show you to the back for a half gallon of Miami’s best orange juice.