Confessional

 

"It had ‘Minnesota’ all over it, and not in ways you might suspect; no signage, no flag, no pebble-sized stepping stones across polyurethane headwaters of the Mississippi."

 

   I said “Hi” to her in Produce between Organics and Salads; she was putting several big white garlic cloves in a bag.
 

   A naturally shy individual, she cordially smiled at me using her eyebrows, then turned toward the bananas and potatoes quickly putting some distance between us for she may have thought there was nothing more to really say.
 

   We were a little more than acquaintances, not exactly friends although I knew her husband and his brother as farmers; their children were about the same as my daughter. They had gone to the same schools.
 

   She was half-way down the condiment aisle when I entered the juice aisle from the wrong direction to get a couple bottles of Low Sodium V-8 and a jar of Smuckers Concord Grape Jam. She stopped at the sandwich pickles and Jalapeno peppers; putting one of each in her basket I saw, later.
 

   I caught a glimpse of her looking demurely at tortilla shells as I chose a good, inexpensive steak to grill outdoors, even when it is only ten above zero. I grill often.
 

   I shop alot. So it is that I frequently meet people I know in stores around town. I find it curious that Covid masks don’t mask the identities of people you know, and only the people you don’t who you wouldn’t recognize anyway, except they’re the only ones who wear grotesque Halloween or clown masks to bring attention to themselves. Say what?
 

   And hasn’t it been a long haul? Not much to laugh about these past many months as local case numbers and death tolls rise and fall with no end in sight. So it was the notion that we need to re-introduce humor into our lives, however spontaneous, struck me just as I discovered her in the canned salmon and tuna aisle on my return there from the tea and coffee aisle for something I had over-looked on my list, and unintentionally cornered her by the greeting card display.
 

   “Hey, I know this may sound strange,” I said, smiling from six feet away. “But I have to confess that I’ve been thinking of you quite often.”
 

   She stood stock-still.
 

   “No, really. Every day and night,” I said, biting my lower lip -- as much as one can see through my beard and mustache. “Let me explain.
 

   “Years ago I was invited to a Father & Sons Banquet by a close friend, and I won a table centerpiece, that you had made, in a door prize drawing. It was a diorama of sorts of a woodland scene made from a little slab of pine with a tree with two bluejays on it, an upright pine cone, a ribbon of ferns and a rock, on it. I really liked it. It was the best one of all the tables.
 

   “Then a few months ago, I moved it from a shelf above my desk to another room . . .”
 

   It was just then that her husband came down the aisle and I saw her breathe a huge sigh of relief. He smiled broadly at me, for we had shared some laughs in the past.
 

   “Hey!” I said cheerfully. “I was just confessing to your wife that I think of her every day -- and frequently every night. I think I’ve put her ill at ease.”
 

   Her husband looked at her to gauge her reaction to my intimate disclosure, then back at me, now very curious himself.
 

   “I explained I won a diorama she had made as a table centerpiece, at a Fathers and Sons banquet many years ago, and really liked it. It had ‘Minnesota’ all over it, and not in ways you might suspect; no signage, no flag, no pebble-sized stepping stones across polyurethane headwaters of the Mississippi. This handmade centerpiece ‘spoke’ to me -- and still does.
 

   “I moved it from a shelf near my desk to another room, where there’s a little night-light over it, and where, for reasons unknown to me I’ve begun thinking of her on a 24-hours basis, every day of the week. Some would say, its frequency was symptomatic of an underlying physical illness.

 

   “Where’d you put it?” her husband asked, his eyebrows scrinched up with concern. “Why would moving it, have anything to do with it?
 

   “I put it on the toilet tank.”