The aisles were thinly populated, which made for discursive stall-side chats. There were easy pickings, too, at the racks of warm bread - Eddie's Bread - baked with microbrews and, in the case of one rye loaf, sauerkraut that is slow-roasted with apples and the Stoudt's Gold Beer brewed on the premises.

The bread was just a target of opportunity, though. We'd come looking for a dry sink, and were immediately distracted by a Mennonite quilt (circa 1930), and hand-cranked cherry pitters, by a beaver top hat, and by cast-ironware, a black-oiled Griswold cornbread pan the most arresting of the lot.

But the hunt narrowed soon enough: At least four dealers were offering, quite unexpectedly, large, vintage wooden bowls.

A good wooden bowl, as you may know, is hard to find, especially when you're in the market for one tight of grain, rich of patina, and 17 inches at the open mouth.

That was the approximate girth of the bowl I'd shattered during our kitchen renovation: I grabbed for it on a high shelf, fumbled it, and watched it crash to the floor, splitting clean in two.

My wife had given me that bowl for my birthday years ago. And though I use a smaller, darker one to toss the salad for daily supper, the Big Bertha was my cherished go-to bowl for dinner parties, picnics and family gatherings.

I liked gazing at it, too - a pool of serenity amid the beeping ("I'm finished now!") dishwasher, the whir of the coffee grinder, and NPR's latest bad news from Baghdad.

It was the color of butternut, soft and warm. It was wide and deep, smooth as a river stone; and you could get good purchase beneath the German potato salad (usually with bare hands), or with the cherry tongs under the lettuce-apple-walnut salad I like to toss with cider vinaigrette for Thanksgiving.

For months I indulged the fantasy that I might put the bowl back together again, employing some miracle glue and butterfly joiners: Sometimes I'd just press it back together to see it whole again.

It ranked up there with my mother's scuffed wooden potato masher, and my worn hand-carved spoons, with a spatter-glazed coffee mug from A.R. Cole, the red-clay master potter, and the curling-edged pot holders the grandkids made.

Which is to say it was a bit of a security blanket and a touchstone, the likes of which I'd resigned myself to never quite encountering again.

Except here they were, suddenly, black-walnut bowls, and painted ones, and chopping bowls, their interiors lacerated by a thousand cuts. There was a mammoth bowl - a yard across - turned from a single piece of maple. There were leathery bowls shrunken out of round by age, a characteristic that ups their price.

So it came to pass that I spied a bowl shoved under a bench, its sides grooved by a shaping tool. It was darker on the outside than my original. But the inside was that same honeyed shade of butternut.

It was almost precisely 17 inches across, too. But best of all, it had a slight crack at the lip, knocking it conveniently into my price range.

At home I scrubbed it out, and when it was dry I rubbed it with olive oil until it shone - until it glowed like copper - under the range-hood light.