Today's ONEWORD.COM: MARKET

To market to market and home again home again...Harvey and I loved going to the Nashville flea market--pralines and pashimas and spices and odd bargains on frankincense and myrrh...He always told me we should set up a booth there. I told him Lie down with fleas and get up with bargains. We both loved the marquetry of the market--treasure of postcards and rhinestones and ribbons and pottery in tiny rectangles of booths--fountain pens and pharaohs, cabinets and candy jars and programs for dance cotillions...We made the unexpected purchase and regretted the bargains that got away...the pink crocheted gloves, the angel print that wouldn't fit in the car, the ABC blocks that were tramp art... I regret everything--every trinket we didn't purchase, every second we spent apart from the pleasure of just looking. I remember so many things--the giant red Buddha (nearly 4 feet tall and he's only a bust) and recall Harvey's delight in him--a child's face when he sees a pony captured perfectly on a 42-year-old canvas. I look at the pink and black (and monocled!) penguin and remember Harvey rushing to tell me that he'd found a treasure, and I said, No, first you have to see this amazing cookie jar. No, you have to see what I found--and as we quibbled he led me toward the corner of the Mule Barn, exactly where I wanted to go. When we reached the booth, what we'd debated turned out to be the same thing--that cookie jar! The dealer had already wrapped it. I knew that one of you'd be back...We only had $8 between us, five for him and three for me, and that's the only thing we could buy that week. We were so poor we couldn't afford laundry so went to in-laws the next weekend to wash clothes. But we--no I--have that cookie jar and that Buddha and these memories: A plique-a-jour dragonfly, a pair of Chinese temple screens, 25 Bakelite bracelets, 15 globes, an Art Deco sculpture, the Matisse print that turned out to be real and not a reproduction...and so many months of holding hands and sharing popcorn and picnicking out of the back of his grandparents' old Crown Victoria...pimiento cheese and Pringles and Pepsi and peanuts and paper plates and Pamela and Harvey and I thought it would never end...but it did.

I'm going back to the Nashville flea market in the spring, and I'm going to discover the perfect inkwell. Half of the journey is anticipation, imagining what you'll see. I half-expect to glimpse his firefly-green shirt an aisle over, to hear his whisper behind me:Whatever you're selling, I'm buying. We won't even haggle over the cost....