In summer, the song sings itself ~ William Carlos Williams
The parking lot stinks of melting tar as I step out of my car and into a snug envelope of heat. I swim through it to the automatic doors of Whole Foods and take a deep breath of cooled air. For about 20 minutes I shop for vegetables and pasta, balsamic vinegar and a roasted chicken. I'm making pasta salad later, grateful for the pre-cooked chicken so I don't have to turn on the oven. While I shop, I forget about the heat. I don't think about anything as I move from produce to dairy and up the pasta/rice aisle.
When I was a housewife many years ago, I believed that I hated grocery shopping, but really I don't, not now and not then when one baby daughter sat in the baby seat and the other baby daughter insisted on walking beside me, her eyes at the level of shelves that hold the off-brands. Even then I could lose myself tapping on cantaloupe or checking the dates on the milk, all the while chatting with the girls in that mindless way that is about as meaningful as humming.
One time in the local supermarket, I lifted a bag of ice out of the cooler, swung it toward the cart, and the bottom split, sending ice chunks skidding all the way from popsicles to frozen peas. A nice young man hustled over to help me, called for a clean-up on aisle 7, and offered the girls a cookie. Let's call him Timmy. Timmy was always around when I shopped at that market, and he always gave the girls cookies, and he always leaned in a little too close. I think he had a crush on me. Or maybe he just admired the kids, who really were adorable and never pitched a fit in public places. Really.
Now when I shop, the grocery store people smile and ask if they can help me and the clerks ask me if it's hot enough for me and how have I been. They're mostly nice people - and I am not a 25-year-old mother of two who weighed 110 pounds and wore mini skirts (it was the 70s). Now I see that I get attention because I have gray hair, because I walk slowly, because I remind them of their granny. At least that's the story I make up.
I came home from shopping, unloaded enough food that now my fridge looks like it belongs to someone who eats (I was down to condiments and feta cheese). Heat rises in waves from the hot pavement and my garage feels like a sauna. Tonight when the temperatures cool enough that I can open the windows to sleep, I'll hear the single cricket that sings from the edges of my little patio, and the moving fan will bring back my grandmother's voice rising in alarm, warning my grandfather, "Don't let that baby near that fan, Paul. Watch that baby!" In those days a kid could get her fingers whacked off in the blades of a fan. In those days there was no AC in the thinly insulated walls of the old house in Terre Haute where my grandparents lived, and their heat came with humidity and the earthy smell of honest sweat and a metallic tinge in the air that meant lightning.
I don't much like heat, but I've learned to find something in it that I do like, and that is the reminder of a self that is more - let's say - than the sum of my parts, a self that moves in a 66-year-old body and can still feel Lisa's 2-year-old hand in mine and can still see those sugar cookies that Timmy wooed the girls with. And I remember those summer visits to Terre Haute, entering a world so different from home in San Francisco, where it was always too cold to open a window at night.
Anything can come back to me when I am navigating a hot parking lot and meandering through a cool grocery store, and I see now that I like grocery shopping because I love the grand theater of the imagination that is constantly triggered by figures on a cereal box or the shape of a sugar cookie.