In an entirely different universe, about a month ago, going to the grocery store wouldn’t merit a mention. But now… we made it 8 days since our last shopping trip, and I would really like to eat an apple or a cucumber again, also, we’re flying through our soap.
With mask and gloves, and without any buses or subways, I walked to the fancy Whole Foods. After the socially-distant line down the block to get in, it was simultaneously luxurious and post-apocalyptic. We don’t usually shop for blood oranges and baby asparagus at $15/pound, and especially after so many homemade meals of variations on chickpeas and rice, browsing felt like a shock. It felt like when I lived in Yantai for months, and then one weekend I saw all the luxe Western food in Beijing.
But there were a lot of glaring, empty spaces on the shelves. I read a lot of novels set in WWII, so I was prepared for very limited meat, eggs, and butter. I tried to pretend I was fighting the Nazis, but mostly I was fighting other customers stocking up. (You can’t even blame them, we all want to go out as little as possible.) Also, no TP, no hand sanitizer, no Lysol wipes, almost no handsoap.
I did find a giant refill bottle of Mrs. Meyers Geranium handsoap, for a price that I would never normally pay and also way too much backpack weight. But those are the concerns of my old life… Now, it’s necessary hand soap! We have 2 pump bottles at home, each with one squirt left, because it’s not polite to take the last of something, and that applies to soap in the plague. My mom didn’t raise me to be rude.
I found a box of matzoh, too, and I started mentally making jokes about hunting the afikoman, and I cracked myself up and starting laughing into my facemask, alone, in the apocalypse, so, doing great over here. Yeah.
Shoppers are no longer able to fill personal bags in the store, so I went out to where they’d put one picnic table upside-down on another one (to make sure no one could gather there) and used the bench as a little shelf to unpack my paper bags into my backpack, with minimum wasted space and evenly distributed weight for the walk home. I’m a master at this part, I did it in my old life, even if I don’t usually do it in gloves. The washing and disinfecting at home is new.
Anyway, did you know what Mrs. Meyers Geranium Soap smells like? Because all the rich people in the Whole Foods definitely knew, there’s a reason that was the only soap left. It smells like flower-scented hot garbage. It has the sweet-rotting scent of durian, with a spray of perfume on top.
A perfect scent for mandated 6 feet of personal space.
