FAREWELL TO THE LITTLE GROCERY

The same family since 1941 ran the little grocery and general store which had its last day on August 30^th, 2022. It’s not the family’s fault, not at all, it’s just circumstance. The clerks have been very sad—people who have worked in the store for many years—and they’ve told me that customers have been crying. 

They get teary while talking about it themselves. It’s a plain little store, but one that is so familiar to everyone in town that it’s more like a relative than a place of business. Every dark knot in the wooden ceiling is familiar to everyone, and it was always much more than a grocery. There was the tiny post office, a good selection of everything and all kinds of things beyond that, and if there was something one wanted, they would try to get it. They always had good local produce, they’d have organic tomatoes, good local dairy, and fruit from the farmlands a few hours away. 

I think of my mother weighing grapes on the little old scale in the produce section, and I can picture her feeling the avocados. The store is so close to her little house she could have walked had she wanted to, and sometimes she probably did, if she just went for a loaf of bread. Going into the store by myself without her, now that she’s gone, is sweet and sad at once. 

Until a decade or so ago, there was a second hand bookstore next to the grocery, that I used to like to browse in during visits to my ma. She would go into the grocery and I would pop into the bookshop, and I remember sitting in her car around the side of the grocery, waiting for her to come out, looking at the copy of Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck that I’d just bought for a dollar. Ma appeared with her few notions in a bag and when she saw what I had she said, “Oh, Sweet Thursday! That’s a wonderful book!” I can still picture the painted bricks of the grocery store through the windshield as she started the car. 

 

As of August 31^st, life in this little town at the edge of the world has begun without its little store, and it will be missed. The only saving grace is that the family has one other little grocery too, farther away, but not terribly far. So all is not lost, but at the moment, it does feel almost as if it is.