Vox Meditantis

What snack would you eat right now?

If I’m being honest – actually, painfully honest – what I would eat right now is a cronut. Not just any pastry, but specifically the raspberry-rose one from that bakery on 4th and Main in my old neighbourhood, the kind that costs nine dollars and requires waiting in a line that wraps around the block. I want the flakiness that gets everywhere, the pretension of it, the noise of the city buses roaring past while I eat it.

But I’m not there. I’m in New Corinth, Delaware, sitting on the fire escape of my third-floor walk-up in the Heights, and what I am actually eating is a pair of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets.​

The Grey River Reality

It’s a Monday evening in January, which means the sky over the Delaware River has been the colour of wet concrete since about 2 p.m.. My roommate, a local girl who grew up here, calls this “New Corinth grey” – a specific shade that settles over the rowhomes and the old industrial skeletons down by the waterfront like a heavy blanket.​

I moved here three months ago because the rent was cheap, and everyone said this place was “up-and-coming” or at least “next”. Coming from a city that never shut up, New Corinth feels weirdly quiet. It’s like the whole town is holding its breath. Down on the street, I can see a flyer for “Polar Lines Day” stapled to a telephone pole. It’s coming up this Thursday. Apparently, it’s this big civic teach-in where people sit down with their ideological opposites and just… talk? In my old city, we didn’t talk to opposites; we just subtweeted them. Here, they archive the arguments in the library. It’s earnest in a way that makes me cringe and weirdly jealous at the same time.​

Sugar and Scrapple

So, back to the snack. These Krimpets are unnervingly yellow. They stick to the roof of my mouth. They are nothing like the artisanal, small-batch pastries I used to post on Instagram. But there’s something about them that fits this place. New Corinth doesn’t care if you’re cool. I walked past a guy on Market Street earlier wearing a full-on welder’s jacket and pyjama bottoms, eating a breakfast sandwich at 4 p.m., and nobody blinked.​

The locals here take their food seriously, but not in a “foam on top” way. They argue about scrapple brands and who has the best crab cakes like it’s a blood sport. My roommate took me to a spot near the creek that serves “soul food that tastes like a hug,” and I swear I almost cried over the mac and cheese. It was heavy and real, just like the history here – the way people talk about the old Iron Works or the “Night of the Neon Cross” like those things are still happening right now, just beneath the surface.​

Eating the Archives

I finish the first Krimpet. It’s too sweet, but the sugar rush helps against the damp cold coming off Minerva Creek. I look out toward the river, where the lights of the port are starting to flick on. It’s not the glittering skyline I’m used to. It’s darker, grittier – Wilmington’s “shadow twin,” they call it.​

I miss my nine-dollar cronut. I miss the performance of being a “city girl.” But as I open the second Krimpet, listening to the distant sound of a train shunting cars on the rail line that supposedly built this town, I realise I’m not just eating a sponge cake. I’m eating the rent I can afford. I’m eating the fact that my neighbour actually knows my name. I’m eating the weird, unpolished reality of 2026 in a town that refuses to just be a suburb.​

So, yeah. I would eat a croissant. But I’m sticking with the Krimpet. It matches the grey.

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Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.