Um…I kind of cried in the grocery store this morning. Not a lot–I’m not coming unhinged here, or anything–but it would be a misleading understatement to say that I got a bit misty-eyed.
I went to a store that was well out of my way, because I wanted to check out the farmer’s market near it, which is apparently there the day after my local one is here. Having decided to price-check at the grocery store and then return to the market (too late, it turned out, although the price in question had been good), I headed in.
The grocery store, which I had only been in once before (on an emergency treat-run for Jolie), was not as nice as I had initially thought. Sure, it was spacious and clean, but it seemed designed for people who don’t like to cook. Their meat section was so tiny that I kept wandering through the store looking for the rest of it, the produce was a tiny island surrounded by prepackaged goods, and they only had about ten varieties of goat cheese (even the smallest stores usually average at least fifteen).
To top it off, there were no loose bottles of Perrier®, forcing me to open up a six-pack, which I hate doing. To clarify: you can buy six one-liter bottles of millions of types of water here, all shrink-wrapped together with a convenient carrying handle. And if you look more carefully, you will notice that there is usually at least one pack of each type of water that has been torn open, with a bottle or three removed. The pricing on the shelves is per bottle, and you see this in every store, so it’s obviously okay. So why does it still feel so wrong?
Anyway. On my way out, something made me pause and turn around, and I found myself facing an end-cap display of…stuff. Like…American stuff.
There were little packages of Oreo’s®, bottles of maple syrup, and jars of marshmallow Fluff® (even some of the strawberry version). There was pancake mix, and Betty Crocker® chocolate-chip cookie mix, and some of that horrid peanut-butter-and-jelly-combined-in-one-bottle nonsense.
Now, it wasn’t that I was feeling especially homesick when I ran into this display. It’s just that someone obviously devoted some real attention to this, on the premise that there would come a point when I was feeling homesick. And that made me not-quite-but-really-kind-of cry. In the middle of the grocery store.
Judge me if you want, but I’m seriously considering going back for some of that peanut-butter-and-jelly stuff. Somehow I’m suddenly craving it.