In the Wilderness
Grocery store hike
oh I love this vista
the pyramid apple pear orange mountains
spread across the plain of polished floor.
I love
the cliff of cleansers in spray bottles.
I travel the canyon
walled by bagged potato chips
run through by veins of red and green
jars of salsa
glowing
in the sparkle of a hundred starry lights
suspended far above my head.
I savor the views:
mosaic bluffs of pale vinegars and red ketchups
tumbled wedges of cheese in the cooler
strata of canned beans.
I cross into the wintry landscape of white and cold
eggs and tofu and milk and ice cream
I marvel at the glass cases
cold against my hand.
I remove myself from
the asphalt in the parking lot
my car
my house and its neediness
my obligations
I meditate
on protein drinks and gluten-free oat bars
and raspberries
glowing in green cartons.
1/3/18
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
A great spin on the term “wilderness”!
You have to navigate it, don’t you!
Boy do I miss grocery shopping…maybe next year. Even if I give in too often to those bags of potato chips. (K)
I still shop, once a week. A real treat it is, even at 7 AM. I do like how quiet the store is that time of day with the restrictions of it being senior hour. I enjoy just looking at the shelves…and imagining all the things I could be making. Plus, it’s always a visual feast, the grocery!
It is. I’ve been inside a store a few times, but always furtively. Mostly I get my groceries delivered. I love especially produce. Something to look forward to.
I really like the transformation of the mundane grocery store into a landscape being explored. I have been only going to the same two grocery stores all year because my familiarity with their “landscapes” assists me in shopping as efficiently and, therefore, safely as possible. When we travel, we enjoy visiting grocery stores so we can see what local fare there might be for us to sample, a different way of experiencing a culture through its everyday food, so that is us exploring an unfamiliar landscape.
We do the same thing, visit “foreign” grocery stores (in usual life). You can find out a lot about a place by looking through its grocery stores, I think. Right now we shop at one place and at senior hour, just as you said – the terrain is familiar to us.
I truly enjoy and relate to this in a surreptitious way. I have to get back into my early morning 7am grocery shops because our upcoming lockdown will cause lineups which I will not do, especially in the cold.
I now go at senior hour which the grocery stores have here since March – the store opens 1 hour early for 60+. I arrive at 7 AM. It used to be we would wait in line but now I’ve changed stores and there is no line. Oh thank goodness for that.
We had the senior hour back in March but at some point they abandoned it. I have a feeling they won’t reinstate it but as of the 26th, the number of people inside a grocery store will be restricted (again) to a percentage of capacity (50% I think).