One of my favorite comfort foods is a sausage roll – a flaky pastry crust surrounding a warm filling of seasoned ground sausage. When I went shopping with my mother on Saturday at the outdoor market in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, she bought each of us a sausage roll just before we got on the bus to go home.
But a lot happened before that magical moment. When we arrived at about 9 a.m., my mother let me wander around by myself while she and her woven basket went grocery shopping. First, I crept into the 900-year-old Moyses Hall, the town museum built of stone. One of its twin-pointed roofs was topped by a steeple and weather-vane. A gigantic clock built into the stone kept time for the market-goers. Like a slueth, I inspected the manacles used for prisoners during Medieval times, gawked at paintings of local pastoral scenes, and read about superstitions and witchcraft.
Next, I hurried over to Boots, a pharmacy store that had two stories. On the second floor, the shelves were filled with fragrant soaps, lotions, and bath salts. I held my nose over the shelves, inhaling the scents one by one. Once in a while, when I had a little money, I’d buy a single rose or lavendar-scented bath salt square to keep in my dresser drawer.
My final destination was the Waterstones Bookstore, a narrow retail space lined with wooden shelves from floor to ceiling, filled with more books than I had ever seen in my life. I found tomes of fairy tales stashed in the shelves in the back corner of the store. Since I had no money to buy one, I sat on the floor, cross-legged with a book in my lap, and read as long as I could, absorbing the words and stories into my brain so I could think about them long after I went home.
But magical mornings never last long enough. Too soon, it was 11:45 and time to meet my mother at the bus stop. When I arrived, she held a greasy Purdy’s bakery bag in her hand with two sausage rolls. We ate them on the bus, licking the flakes of pastry off our fingers and wishing that the morning didn’t have to end.
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