Shopping Lists

I don't use them. Never have. No need to. I just walk down the aisles of our local grocery supermarket and select what I know I need. Once a week, every week. Works out to just about the same time of day, too. Predictable, one might say. This morning I baked a peach pie, and prepared a chicken soup to simmer on the back of the stove. I cleaned up the house a bit, for the week-end.

While I was thus busy, my husband fixed up the dining room chandelier that had somehow, mysteriously, slid down on the cord that affixed it to the ceiling, to rest on the rose medallion bowl sitting in the middle of the dining room table. It's a very heavy chandelier, made of metal worked into the shapes of red poppies. We had heard nothing to warn us of what had occurred.

And were quite happy that it came to rest so gently on the bowl, which did not shatter. Nothing like a hundred-year-old porcelain piece to keep the peace. And because the temperature rose to just below freezing, and the wind was slight compared to the last two days, and the sun was out, we took ourselves and our little dogs out to the ravine for our daily ramble there.

Then we drove to the supermarket, so I could do the shopping. While he sat in the car, in the sun, with the dogs, reading today's newspapers. In the supermarket - quite crowded this day - I set about assembling the edibles we'd need to carry us through the week. Sans shopping list.

I selected: grape tomatoes, cluster tomatoes, spinach, asparagus, carrots, parsnips, yellow, orange and red bell peppers, mushrooms, russet potatoes, sweet potato, daikon, sugar snap peas, cooking onions, anise, two bunches of bananas, clementines, naval oranges, two containers of strawberries, one of persimmons.

Also because they were on sale, three toilet tissue bundles (one for our daughter), high-energy laundry detergent, plain yogurt, 2% milk, chocolate milk, 10% coffee cream, Earl Grey tea, lemon juice, orange-cranberry juice, bag of red lentils, bag of demerara sugar, bag of frozen peas, Vitamin E eggs, bag of frozen raspberries.

The chocolate milk for our granddaughter who will spend a few days with us during March break. Chocolate-covered twizzle-biscuits for her, as well, along with a package of chicken-bacon, for she will not eat beef or pork. She'll have the chicken-bacon for breakfast with eggs, insisting on doing her own eggs.

We've no need of bread since my husband bakes all of our breads. No meat or cheese; lots in the refrigerator. Ditto butter. As for coffee, my husband orders free trade organic coffee beans which he roasts himself, that meets his needs in that department; I stick with tea.

I shop at a very basic supermarket where you are expected to bring your own food containers and pack your groceries yourself. I'd bought three large black plastic bins over a decade ago from them when they first opened. As I was drawing items out of the shopping cart and placing them on the counter in front of the cashier, a woman behind me with a quarter-full cart watched me emptying my burgeoning one.

I must have a large family, she opined. I laughed: "me and my husband", and she lifted her eyebrows. In her cart, a few pre-prepared items, like pizza. She was, I judged, about fifteen years younger than me, nicely presented, somewhat large and certainly overweight. But she was genuinely interested and wanted to know what they were, the persimmons. And the anise, and the daikon. And I was happy to explain.

Next time she shopped, she said, she would look for those items, and buy them, and try them. I daresay, I hope she writes them down before she forgets, and takes along a shopping list.