What We Came For and What We Left With

First Saturday of October. The market runs until noon but we got there at eight-forty-something because Simone had a specific errand in mind, a honey vendor she'd mentioned twice in September, and I came mostly for the walk and the light, which was already doing something particular by the time we got off the bus. That specific low October angle where it catches the underside of the canvas canopy and makes everything look like it's being held in place just long enough to be noticed.

The honey vendor wasn't there. This happens at markets in October, the season is rearranging itself and some stalls don't make it to the later dates. Simone noted it without drama, the way she notes most things, and then we kept walking. I ended up spending eleven minutes looking at a table of dried flower bundles and late-season gourds because the shadows they were casting onto the wooden crate surface were the specific kind of interesting that I cannot explain to anyone who isn't already looking at the same thing. Simone was standing beside me, and then she said something about the light that I had been trying to find the sentence for, and that was the end of that. She named it first. She always names it first.

Neither of us were looking at the camera.

We left with: one small dried wheat bundle (mine, which I am already uncertain about, the cord is going to judge it), a paper bag of the last good tomatoes of the year from a vendor near the east entrance, and approximately forty minutes of walking that cost nothing. The tomatoes are on the kitchen counter. The wheat bundle is propped against the windowsill arrangement because I haven't decided if it stays or if it goes the way the botanical bundle went last October. The light at eight-forty in the morning right now is worth getting there early for. That's the whole report.

Simone was mid-sentence. I was looking at something else. Accurate.