Grocery Store Grace

Blueberry muffins

November 2025

The Common Household Husband and I were at the grocery store the other day.  (It’s like date night for us.)  CHH asked about the blueberry muffin mix I was holding – it’s not an item we ever buy.  I explained, “It’s for the food bank.”  

The Girl Scouts were doing a collection of Thanksgiving items, and for once in my life I was organized and had the list, which included “baked goods mixes”.  Given the cruel halt on SNAP benefits and the ongoing federal government shutdown, making a donation seemed imperative.

Suddenly there was a woman next to me, saying to me, “I overheard that you are getting things for the food bank.  If I give you $20 cash could you please buy extra to give to the food bank?”  

! ! !

I balked.  I actually prefer to give a financial donation to the food bank, but I was buying physical groceries that day so that the Girls Scouts collection would be filled with items. An encouragement to the Girl Scouts to applaud their efforts.  Also, I was reluctant to accept cash from a stranger.  

I said to her pleasantly, “This is for a collection for Local Food Bank.  I encourage you to give a dollar donation to them directly. You can donate online.  That’s very helpful to them.”  The woman enthusiastically accepted my answer, and said, “Yes, I think I can do that.  Or at Other Local Food Bank, which my church supports!  I was just so grateful to hear someone is getting things to help food banks.”  I in turn thanked her for her willingness to help out in this time of grave need.

There it is: a weird but heartwarming slice of life in 2025.  And now it turns out Local Food Bank is running out of storage space because of all the items people have donated.  A monetary donation is definitely the way to go in this moment!  Now if only the nation could be heartwarming enough to fully fund SNAP for those in need, and to pay people living wages so maybe there will be fewer people in need.  Oh, and make health care affordable for everyone and not connected to employment.  And just not be nasty and cruel.  Is it too much to ask?

2016 collection for Food Bank

September 2025

I entered the grocery store on the Thursday after Labor Day, and procured what the homegrown folks here call “a buggy,” i.e. a shopping cart.  In the cart the previous shopper had left behind a handwritten list that said:

What else could anyone need?

15 - 20s

15 - 10s

16 - 5s

2 - 1s

_____________

6 Tequila

2 Grenadine

5 Vodka

2 Rum

3 Jim Beam

1 Old Grandad

All I could think was - someone is going to have a much more exciting weekend than I am.  Both cash AND booze!  So much liquid courage!

Gin - not on the list. 
But surely, especially in 2025,
it's Five O'Clock somewhere.

A little bit of what was going on then:  

• Personally: eye doctor and ear doctor appointments to deal with non-life-threatening but annoying health stuff.  (The ear stuff is ongoing.)

• We (the nation) didn’t know if we would be able to get a covid vaccine.  (Our state legislators and governor came through for us.)

• The US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr was revealed to be a nutjob (well, most of us knew that already, but he testified in Congress - without being sworn in - and exhibited his nutjobbiness).  He had decimated the CDC and cut vaccine research.  

• We were in the midst of a soul-crushing election campaign of misinformation funded by the richest man in PA to unseat three PA Supreme Court justices so that he could better control the courts and the 2026 elections.  Severely anxiety producing.  (On Nov 4th we won decisively, and the rich guy lost. But I’m sure it won’t be the last we hear from him.)

• There was still no PA state budget (it was supposed to be in place by July 1, 2025) and I was calling my electeds about that.  Our State Rep said that dealing with the Republicans was like negotiating with jello.  (That state budget was just signed today Nov 12, 2025.)

No wonder our mystery shopper needed those items on that list.

2017.  Image of pile of
cash in our Congressman's hand.

Pin the spine on the Congressman.
Spines still needed today.

These days, whenever something weird happens at the grocery store, I think back to this, two years ago:

July 2023  

I was at the grocery store, with the pasta & sauce aisle completely to myself.  I sneezed.  A disembodied voice from the next aisle over said, “Bless you!”  After a split-second pause, I shouted back, “Thank you!”  

Chivalry is not dead.

A great mosaic

First Lines: July-August 2018 edition

I bought meself these roses to cheer meself up.

My reading during July and August centered on lamentation, with a smattering of redemption.  I was privileged to read some excellent writing on some difficult topics.  Here are the first lines of books I finished.

Book 1

How lonely sits the city

    that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

    she that was great among the nations!

She that was a princess among the provinces

    has become a vassal.

Book 2

Miss Jane Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday.  It was pretty much a surprise all round.

Book 3

Born in 1984: Masha

On the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Masha’s grandmother, a rocket scientist, took Masha to the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow to be baptized.

Book 4

The winter had become a test of endurance and patience, especially for those living in northern Wisconsin. 

Book 5

Higher Ground

I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man.  In 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and inexperienced and worried that I was in over my head.  I had never seen the inside of a maximum-security prison – and had certainly never been to death row.  When I learned that I would be visiting this prisoner alone, with no lawyer accompanying me, I tried not to let my panic show.

* * * * * *

Titles and authors revealed:

Book 1

Lamentations, by Jeremiah.  ©586–520 BCE.

It is customary among some Jews to read the book of Lamentations during the period between some fast I never heard of and the fast of the 9^th of Av (which memorializes the destruction of The Temple).  Lamentations seems appropriate for us today, too.

Book 2

Still Life, by Louise Penny © 2005.  Read for the second time, for book club.  I still wonder if the painting that is so central to the story would be actually possible to paint. 

Book 3

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen. © 2017. Very well-written.  Amazon says this is a 527-page book, but I read it in 5 days, although that was partly because it was a kindle version borrowed from the library, and it threatened to disappear from my reader if I did not truck on through it. 

The subject matter is unsettling and alarming.  Anyone who thinks they admire Putin and his Russia needs to read this book. It includes the stories of several people living through the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin’s regime. 

It also includes a Cliff-notes version of Hannah Arendt’s explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.” Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.

I wonder if Arendt’s notions about loneliness relate to Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.  I have that on my list to read. 

Book 4

On The River (Bassville Stories Book 2) by Melissa Westemeier © 2018.

I loved escaping to the riverbanks of the Wissapaw River in Wisconsin, to read about the lives of the fine people of the town of Bassville.  The machinations of Maw made me laugh out loud.  The novel includes a just treatment of people’s reactions to a difficult life situation.

Book 5

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson.  © 2014.  What can I say?  Every American should read this book.  (I read it for book club.  It was helpful to discuss the book.) The stories here are gripping and important, and Stevenson tells them well.  He leads us through our justice system, which is no more “color-blind” now than it was in 1980 or 1940 or 1880.  Can we find “liberty and justice for all” in our nation?  And yet, in spite of our brutal history, Stevenson offers a note of redemption. Mercy is an undeserved offering of grace and forgiveness, and Stevenson finds mercy in the middle of terrorism and strife and injustice.  Read This Book.

Cabin of Grace

A Psalm of Thanksgiving

The Lord is my park ranger;

I have everything I need.

He gives me the key to a cabin in the woods

And leads me beside the still waters of the vernal pond

Where the trees all around rustle their praise of God's name;

Thus he restores my soul.

He leads me on the right path to get to the boathouse

and grows wildflowers in the nature reserve for his name's sake.

Even though the way is sometimes too narrow

and the hiking path is covered with mud,

I will fear no evil

For the park ranger has marked the trail with blue blazes on tree trunks

 so that I shall not be lost.

Though the ground beneath me is slippery, he will not cause me to fall;

he lifts my foot up out of the mud.

The park ranger tells me where I can buy matches, which I forgot to bring,

so that I can light the campfire.

You make it possible to prepare hamburgers on the grill,

in the presence of rabbits and birds;

You have caused me to remember the ketchup.

My cup of lemonade overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall sweep me along like the creek waters.

And I shall dwell in the cabin of God's grace for my whole life.

 - The Book of Jubilations 23:1-6

* * * * * * * * * *

I wrote this as a serious expression of gratitude to God for the three-day respite we had at this cabin in the woods earlier this month.  But when I recited the first line to my husband, he guffawed.    I stand by my portrayal of God as park ranger – to me it’s more relevant than the image of a shepherd.

Our three days was quite restorative.  We hiked in the forest, and got entirely muddy.  We observed animal tracks in the mud – definitely deer, and maybe raccoon tracks.   We saw a wild turkey, red-winged blackbirds, and heard a bullfrog in the reeds.

Another name for "vernal pond" is "mosquito breeding ground."
By a miracle, there were no mosquitoes during our entire stay.

Animal footprints in the mud.
Are these raccoon prints (after all, we were in Raccoon Creek
State Park), or, as my husband suggested, velociraptor tracks?
In any case, there was plenty of mud.

Younger Daughter got entirely muddy.  Even way more muddy
than in this photo.  She loved it.

We cooked dinner on the grill outside.  We roasted marshmallows.  We made 6-minute soft-boiled eggs and water for tea on the stove inside the cabin, and enjoyed blueberry buckle which I baked at home and brought with us.

Hooray for being able to buy a
lighter at the boathouse!

A week before our trip, we ran out of ketchup.  For the trip,
I packed one bottle of ketchup. Younger Daughter,
remembering the deprivation of the previous week,
 packed two more.

We canoed and did some fishing on the lake in the face of strong winds.   We observed my family’s time-honored tradition of going to the beach when no one else is there because the weather is cold and unpleasant. 

A fishie!

It was windy, chilly, and rainy.  That's my husband and
daughter in the water anyway.

We stayed in the cabin and read our books. We ignored the internet (no wifi at the cabin!).  YD played board games and card games with her Dad, while I wrote a psalm depicting God as a park ranger.  We played the “Jeopardy Game!!” which I made for my husband’s 50^th birthday (which he happened to find under the bed while he was packing for the trip, and threw in at the last minute).  

Final Jeopardy category:  Sports.
Click to embiggen to read.
I lost because I forgot to answer in the form of a question.

It really was a cabin of grace: an undeserved gift.