Time Travel
The Root of It
I rushed through the automatic doors, distracted by the food I needed to purchase for my niece and nephew. Choosing snacks for little humans felt like a high-stakes mission for this auntie with no kids of her own. Combine that with what I knew would be a limited selection from a small-town grocery store, I was mildly stressed that I wouldn't find anything that they'd be excited to eat. I clung to the few suggestions offered before I left - cheese sticks and goldfish crackers.
As I rounded the corner of the interior set of doors into the grocery, I stopped dead in my tracks, pulled from my reverie by the tile floor. No longer am I a 47-year-old aunt looking for snacks. I'm 13, sweaty from a bike ride, cash from my mom tucked safely in my pocket, sent to pick up a loaf of bread.
I haven't been inside this grocery in at least 25 years. But in the two decades prior to that, I came here often. First with my mom, then on my own. Initially making my way here on my red ten-speed bike, then driving the "blue beast" after I got my license. Back then, I doubt that I noticed the tile whose colors escape description or the unique signs that mark the aisles.
But on this day, the combination of the tile and the signs is enough to pull me out of my thoughts about snacks. My parents sold and moved out of my childhood home exactly 20 years ago. WIth my youngest sister having graduated high school and moved on to college, my parents were no longer bound to a little town in the middle of nowhere. So they moved a few hours east, closer to where both of my sisters were living at the time.
With that move, I had no reason to go back to where I grew up. The longer I was away, the less I felt like it was mine. But in the last four years, I've had reasons to return. We held my dad's funeral there when he died in 2019, and just this week, I was there over two days for the services of my youngest sister's mother-in-law (an incredible woman who's joy, generosity, and cheese balls will be greatly missed).
It was these services that had me on a snack run. Which was how I found myself in a time warp, standing in the soda aisle of a little grocery store in a small town in west-central Illinois. I'd already been in town for a few hours and was buoyed by seeing a handful of people I knew - a few folks from our old church and a couple of woman I went to school with.
Before coming back for my dad's service in 2019 and again recently for Barb's, I was nervous about being back in town. Being around crowds of people always makes me anxious, and for some reason, the idea of being around people that I knew long ago makes that anxiety worse. But both times, both for my dad's service and for Barb's, I had the wonderful experience of being reminded that you can go home again. It is an absolute joy to reconnect with old neighbors and friends, to drive by our old house, and to go to the grocery store too, it turns out.
With everything that is changing in the world, both good and bad, it was a tremendous relief to walk into that grocery and see the tile floor, those signs hanging above the aisle, and the odd shaped carts that I've never seen anywhere else. I can't explain why relief is what I felt, as even as I write this that strikes me as an unusual emotion. But it was relief. And comfort too.
When I moved away from home, email was barely a thing, social media didn't exist, and the idea of a phone that fits in your pocket AND serves as a camera would have been beyond comprehension. So would have a winter where it doesn't snow much. But through decades of growth and evolution, Hi-Lo remains. With the red-and-white sign atop the building and the loud coolers humming in the background, it reminds me that for all that changes, some things don't.
So when I feel unmoored, which happens often, I have a few more pictures to help bring me back. Added to the photos I've taken in my favorite wild places, there are now photos of a grocery store. But it's not images of the tile, the carts, or the brown signs that are comforting, it's what they represent. A small, rural community in the middle of nowhere. Home.
I usually don't include links in the newsletter, but there are a few things that I've particularly enjoyed lately:
This article on the incomparable Sinéad O'Connor.
Recent episodes of The Daily from the New York Times on college admissions for the 1%, menopause, and the history of the NRA and gun rights in the US
Lyz Lenz's Dingus of the Week is one of my favorite things about Fridays. A week or so ago, she wrote about Dale Earnhardt Jr. getting mad at Bandit, the dad in the glorious kids show Bluey. It was <chef's kiss>.
Until next time,
Kim
www.juniperuscoaching.com