Joys of Grocery Shopping
/During my career – I generally left my house between 6 and 6:30 for my morning commute. Now I only leave the house at that time for grocery shopping; prior to the pandemic, I didn’t head out until about 9. I am realizing, after several months of the early grocery runs, that the 6 to 6:30 AM timing seems ‘natural’ to me – perhaps because of the long-standing routine established during my career. I never stopped waking up by 5:30 anyway.
These days it is dark when I leave the house…dark when I get to the covered parking lot of the grocery store. A few weeks ago, I was seeing the sunrise – always a good start to the day. There are few people in the store and the items I need are generally well stocked. I like that the store has an app where I can scan my items with my phone as I shop and place them in my own bags. It makes it possible to use my own bags for produce too avoiding almost all single use plastic bags. I check out at one of the self-checkouts by simply scanning the barcode on the screen to retrieve my order and touching my credit card to another screen to pay for it.
I’ve started buying flowers again. Recently I bought ‘red sunflowers’ – which looked great in the store. I didn’t realize until I got the home and was trimming the stems before putting them into a vase that the ‘red’ was from dye in their water! What a mess…I even have red splotches on my hands that will have to wear off! I cut some day lily leaves from my front flower bed to put around the flowers in the vase...planning to enjoy the flower as much as possible even though I will not buy them again. I’ll have to think about whether I should put them in the compost once they droop.
Overall – there is a lot of joy in the grocery shopping experience right now…it’s probably the only kind of shopping I look forward to!
