Forty Varieties

October sixteenth. The expired coupon booklet was for a Saturday market, which I never went to, but it turns out there's also a Thursday evening version three blocks further east than I usually walk, and it runs until seven, and I had no reason not to go. That's the whole origin story. I texted Simone on a Tuesday, she said yes with the speed of someone who had been waiting for an excuse, and by Thursday at five-thirty we were standing in front of a man who was selling approximately forty kinds of hot sauce from a folding table covered in a gingham cloth.

He explained three of them to us in detail. Simone asked two follow-up questions per bottle, which I would have found excessive except that the questions were genuinely good. We bought two, one labeled something involving mango and one labeled something involving smoke, and I was already composing the blog post in my head by the time we moved to the next stall. I photographed the honey jars at the second vendor because they were sitting in the last of the afternoon side light and they looked like something worth photographing, which is a sentence I wouldn't have written six months ago. Simone read every label on every jar. Every single one. I did not rush her.

Simone reads every label. every single one.

We walked the whole thing, maybe a dozen stalls total, not enormous, but enough, and came out the other end with the two hot sauce bottles, a jar of honey, and a collective strong opinion about a butternut squash display that had been arranged with a confidence neither of us felt the squash had earned. Simone made an argument about proportion. I have a photograph of her making it. We took the long way back because the light was doing something good to the street and neither of us was in a hurry to stop.

walked out with hot sauce, honey, and a strong opinion about squash

I found that coupon booklet because I'd been noticing my Saturdays were all the same route. This wasn't a Saturday. It also wasn't the same route. I'm counting it anyway.