Having retied her New Balance sneaker
she rises from her spot under the green umbrella,
slings the handle of her mother’s gently unraveling 
wicker basket over her arm as she begins to weave 
her way through Lancaster’s Central Market, 
picking up some goat cheese from Linden Dale 
Farm, established in 1797. She stops at Groff’s 
Vegetables, like she used to as a young girl 
with her mother, and there are still women wearing 
white caps over their hair, helping shoppers 
select produce from the wooden crates full 
of Silver Queen corn, red and yellow tomatoes, 
peaches, peppers, and green leaf lettuce.

Two women with shopping bags call out to each
other in friendly greeting. She thinks of her brother 
and his passion for molasses cookies as she passes 
Wendy Jo’s. Her mother was brought to this market 
by her mother, to discover red-beet eggs. She passes 
Spring Glenn and rice pudding with plump raisins
and smiles at two boys eating big mouthfuls 
of sticky bun, the way her son used to do. She stops 
at Saifes Middle Eastern Food for a ma’amoul, 
made with dates from the Holy Land. She buys 
a glazed donut from Stoltzfus’s for later, and is given 
a fifty-cent silver coin as change. She picks up crab 
for crabcakes at Mr. Bill’s Fresh Seafood stand.

If it were spring there would be shad and market stands
with asparagus, new potatoes, and rhubarb for pie. 
Forsythia outside would spike the brown landscape,
its branches crowded with shards of brave promise.

But it's August now, and the fresh tidal scent of the sea lingers 
above Mr. Bill’s stand, and outside the morning sun saturates 
the scene as if it were the sound of a brass band from the forties—
but after the War, or maybe the sun this day is more like 

the music of a single cornet played by a man who once knew 
hard times—and now an old friend she hasn’t seen in years, 
emerges from around the corner, his stride easy as a breeze.