The Block That Comes Back

March twenty-seventh. The Saturday market is back on the block past the hardware store, and I found out the way I find out every year, by walking past it accidentally and then stopping like I'd planned the whole thing.

I went for coffee. The coffee shop is two blocks further but the market redirected me, the way markets do when the weather makes a credible spring argument for the first time. I bought a bunch of kale from a table near the first tent and then spent longer than necessary at a row of honey jars a few stalls in, which is a thing I do with honey jars specifically, I'm not sure why. The jars have a particular quality of invitation. I picked up the one I'd been looking at for two full minutes and put it in the tote.

The honey row. This is the look that means I'm already deciding.

There's a mood that belongs only to the first Saturday market of the season and only to the hour before it gets crowded. The vendors are still arranging things and not yet tired of answering questions and the light is doing something real across the tent canopies. I am aware this sounds like I'm describing a feeling from a catalog but I mean it plainly: it's the one morning of spring that feels genuinely unhurried, and I'm there for it every year before I remember I'm a person who goes to the market.

I walked home the long way. The route has a second corner now, I've mentioned this without making a thing of it, and I took it, kale under one arm, honey in the bag, the kind of morning that doesn't need a plan. Gerald has a new leaf coming in on the kitchen windowsill. The cord is there. The arrangement is there. I put the honey next to the collapsed bowl on the shelf above the stove and stood in the kitchen for a minute just looking at where everything was.

Walking back out with more than I came for. Every time.