The Return of the Daylight Market as the Warm Belt Rewinds Its Clocks

PHOENIX / SEVILLE — The clocks are rewinding across the warm belt, and the strangest part of the cool season's return is how much the daylight has to be relearned. For four months, cities from Phoenix to Seville lived nocturnal — markets at midnight, business at three in the morning, the sun a thing to hide from. This week, with afternoons finally survivable, the daylight markets reopened, and the vendors who had not seen a noon customer since May blinked in the honest light like people leaving a cinema. "It feels indecent, selling tomatoes at midday," laughed Phoenix grocer Marisol Vega, half-serious, hauling her stall back into the sun. "For a whole summer, noon was the enemy. Now I am supposed to smile at it." There is mourning under the relief, the same note Seville struck at its farewell festival: the night belonged to everyone equally, its markets a democracy of insomniacs, and the returning day brings back the ordinary hierarchy of working hours. The warm belt is rewinding its clocks, glad of the cooler sun and quietly missing the dark it lived in. By noon the markets were full again. By habit, half the shoppers still looked surprised to be awake.