We were just there to walk around the farmers market. A last-minute Sunday thing to get out of the house and stop staring at the same four walls. My little girl, Penny, was unusually quiet, holding my hand tighter than usual as we moved between the rows of stalls.
She’s six. Still figuring out how to carry big feelings, still asking about my mom every time we pass a flower stand that looks like the kind her grandma used to stop at.
So when she pulled on my sleeve and said, almost to herself, “I wish Grandma was here,” I just nodded and said, “I know, sweetheart. Me too.”
But someone heard her.
This older woman in a blazer – like, full-on coral jacket, dark trousers, the whole thing – was standing not far from us, looking at a table of preserves. She turned around slowly. Made eye contact with Penny. Then smiled.
Not the
Not the Polite Stranger Smile
Not the tight, sympathetic, I-accidentally-overheard-something-private smile. Not the one where people look away fast and pretend it didn’t happen.
This was different. Warm in a way that didn’t feel performed. She crouched down, just slightly, so she wasn’t towering over Penny.
“I heard that,” she said. Not apologetically. Just honestly.
Penny looked up at me. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. Just waited.
The woman said, “My grandma used to bring me to markets like this one. Every Saturday. Rain or shine.” She paused. “I miss her too.”
Penny stared at her for a second. Then: “Did she like flowers?”
“She loved them. Especially the ones that smelled bad but looked pretty.”
Penny thought about this. “Grandma liked those too.”
The woman laughed. A real one, short and low. “Then they would have gotten along.”
—
That was it. That was the whole exchange. Maybe ninety seconds, start to finish. The woman straightened up, touched Penny’s shoulder once, and went back to looking at the preserves. We kept walking.
But Penny was different after that. Less tight in the hand. She started pointing things out again, the way she usually does, the lopsided gourds, a dog wearing a bandana, a man selling honey who had a beard she found suspicious.
She was back. Whatever had been sitting heavy on her had shifted just enough.
What My Mom Was Actually Like
My mom died fourteen months ago. Ovarian cancer, diagnosed late, moved fast. The kind of timeline that doesn’t give you enough room to do anything but react.
She was sixty-three. Her name was Diane. She was the kind of person who remembered what everyone ordered at restaurants without writing it down, who kept a specific brand of ginger ale in her fridge at all times because one of her grandkids mentioned once, years ago, that it helped their stomach. She had opinions about parking lots and strong feelings about the right way to fold a fitted sheet and she was right about most things, which was annoying and also the most comforting fact of my adult life.
She had a thing about flowers. Not in a precious way. She just always stopped. She’d see a bucket of zinnias outside a grocery store and she’d slow down and look at them like she had time to look at them, even when she didn’t.
Penny picked that up from her. The stopping. The looking.
I didn’t notice until after my mom was gone, when I caught Penny standing in front of a flower display at a gas station, completely still, just looking. And I had to go sit in the car for a minute.
The Farmers Market Had Been Her Thing
My mom was the one who started the Sunday farmers market habit. She’d drive over to our place, always ten minutes early, always with a canvas bag that had a small rip in one handle she refused to fix, and we’d walk the stalls for an hour.
She’d buy things she didn’t need. A jar of hot pepper jelly. Dried pasta in weird shapes. Honey from that guy with the suspicious beard, actually, though she never found the beard suspicious.
After she died, I stopped going. Not a conscious decision. It just didn’t happen.
This was the first time back. Four weeks after what would have been her birthday. I hadn’t planned it that way. We just ended up there.
Penny didn’t know all of that. She’s six. I tell her the broad version: Grandma got very sick, and now she’s gone, and it’s okay to miss her. She accepts this the way kids accept hard things, fully and strangely, with no apparent ceiling on how often she can return to it.
“I wish Grandma was here” was probably the fourth time she’d said some version of that sentence that week.
The Woman in the Coral Blazer
I’ve been thinking about her since.
She was maybe seventy. Silver hair, cut short. The blazer was the kind of thing you wear when you’re going somewhere and the farmers market just happens to be on the way. She had a cloth bag too, and she’d been examining the preserves with actual focus, the kind where you pick up the jar and read the label properly instead of just looking at the color.
She didn’t introduce herself. I didn’t introduce myself. I don’t know her name.
What I keep coming back to is the way she did it. She didn’t make it about comforting me. She didn’t look at me at all, really. She looked at Penny. She talked to Penny. She offered her something specific: not reassurance, not a platitude, but a matching story. I have someone I miss too. Here’s a detail about her. Here’s something they had in common.
That’s hard to do. Most adults, when they encounter a child’s grief, go one of two ways. They either over-explain or they deflect. They say “she’s in a better place” or they change the subject. This woman just sat down in it with Penny for ninety seconds and then let her go.
I don’t know if she thought about it beforehand. Probably not. Probably it was just instinct, the way some people have instincts for exactly that kind of moment.
But it worked. Whatever she did, it worked.
Penny on the Drive Home
On the way back to the car, Penny bought a small jar of apple butter with her own money, which she’s very serious about spending correctly. She deliberated for four minutes. She asked the vendor if it was “sweet or the other kind.” He said sweet. She approved.
In the car she held the jar in her lap and said, “I think Grandma would have liked that lady.”
I said, “Yeah. I think so too.”
“She was like a grandma,” Penny said. Not sadly. Just as an observation.
Then she asked if we could get lunch somewhere with good grilled cheese, and that was the end of it.
—
I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this story since Sunday. Not because anything dramatic happened. Nothing dramatic happened. A stranger at a farmers market said a kind thing to my kid and then we went home.
But I keep thinking about what Penny’s face looked like right after. How she went from that tight, turned-inward version of herself to the normal version, the one who has opinions about suspicious beards and asks complicated questions about grilled cheese preparation.
All it took was someone who didn’t look away.
What I Think About Now
I’m not great at grief. I mean, nobody is, but I’m especially not. I do the thing where I keep moving, keep managing, keep tracking what Penny needs and what the house needs and what work needs, and I don’t slow down long enough to let myself feel the full weight of it because if I do I’m not sure what happens next.
My mom would have had thoughts about this. She’d have said something dry and accurate that I’d have rolled my eyes at and then thought about for a week.
She’d have liked the woman in the coral blazer. She had a thing for people who knew how to actually show up. Not performatively. Just quietly, in the right direction, at the right moment.
She also would have bought every jar of that apple butter and probably a second one for her neighbor, Gail, who she’d been feuding with mildly for eleven years and still brought food to constantly.
—
I went back to the flower stand on the way out. The one Penny always stops at. I stood there for a minute. Didn’t buy anything.
Just stopped. Just looked.
The zinnias were orange and pink and a little battered from the morning. Not perfect. Still pretty.
I thought: okay, Mom. I see them.
Then I went and found Penny negotiating aggressively over a second jar of apple butter she did not have enough money for, and I paid the difference, and we went home.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on. Someone else probably needs it today.
Speaking of unexpected encounters, you might be interested in reading about the cop who pulled up to my daughter’s cookie stand or even what happened when my son broke his arm at the farmers market. For a different kind of story, hear about the devastating New Jersey house fire that claimed the lives of Paul Avery and his wife.
