You can never go home

 Reading: True Grit by Charles Portis

Listening to: "Someone You Loved" by Lewis Capaldi

Outside: Barbeques smoke high in the spring evening, wafting flavours everywhere

Here I am, away from the hubbub of family life: taking a short break from the constant. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about the discovery I made just recently, when I was feeling nostalgic. You know that kind of nostalgia, that pull that takes you away from whatever you were doing - washing the dishes or pumping gas, adding something else in your kids' school calendar - that love and sadness that spins together into something whole. A remembering of something you lost. 

Well, guys, I'm here to tell you. Marsh Supermarket on Fox Road in Geist, Indianapolis, Indiana, has died. 

Abandoned, the huge chunk of the strip mall where I spent a lot of my young years is an empty shell. I found out on Google, where news stories appeared, saying they closed its shutters due to bankruptcy. 

This jars me hard, not only that it's happened, but because it happened the same year my mom passed away, in 2017. 

How could it be that they both died at the same time? 

I know, I know - you can't equate your mom with a grocery store. I know. But to my mom, Marsh was a Big Deal when I was little. About the time I looked like this. 

Super Cool Me 

We went there for everything: weekly grocery shopping, where she picked up all the Kraft Mac & Cheese and hot dogs and Kool-Aid and the strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups my sister and I were so obsessed with. We went there for the deli, where I stood as a tiny kid, watching the lady in all white scoop out those beautiful big spoonfuls of mashed potato into those paper bowls, and top it with thick, rich brown gravy. The kind of gravy you can't see through. I remember how the deli lady would slap that thin plastic lid on and print a little sticker that went across the top, and hand it to my mom. Still warm. I remember the excitement of how good dinner was going to be. The clack-clack-clack of the wheels of the shopping cart over the square beige floor tiles. 

On Sundays, Mom got me and my sister to stock up the trunk of her car with paper Marsh grocery bags full of that week's newspapers. Plastic Marsh grocery bags full of empty plastic Coke bottles. A scattering of aluminum cans - Sprite, Grape Drink - jumped in and went with us on the journey to the Marsh parking lot, where she let us throw all the recycling into the appropriate big recycle bin - huge, hulking things, to me the size of train cars. (I still diligently recycle today.)

How, at the cash register, they used to scan your items over a red laser that hid under a weird star shape in the counter, and Mom would write a check (a check!) and someone bagged it for you, and took it out to your car. I haven't seen that kind of service anywhere, in any country, ever since.

Marsh is where, at age 15, I went the first time I drove my car - a boat-sized, rusted blue 1991 Pontiac 6000 LE - by myself. It was only a five-minute drive, but to me it was a thrilling voyage down the familiar road my mom had taken me and my sister countless times. Feeling the road under you when you're steering is a completely different experience, and Marsh was a landing point. And a starting point. 

It was the vector of my life. Force and magnitude. Osco Drug, next door, where my mom picked up nameless paper-wrapped prescriptions but always let us pick a sucker off of the sucker tree near the cash registers before we left. The tanning place a few doors down, where, as a teen, I went bronze on the tanning beds, and even saved one of my stickers for some unknown reason, at the blithe age of 17 - to eventually give to my 11-year-old daughter, more than twenty years later. 

It's where, at age 18, I found Geist Bear, one of the first gifts I ever sent to my future husband. The last purchase I ever made from Marsh Supermarket.

Geist Bear

Marsh was the first place I ever lost my mom. 

I couldn't been more than seven or eight, and I had been looking at something; I turned to the woman next to me, and said, "Mom?" 

But, with her dark, curly hair and unfamiliar purple coat, she wasn't my mom. Stomach pit-fall.

She took my hand and kindly led me to her, the next aisle over, and the relief was more than can be rendered into words. 

I guess, Marsh, you were my training ground for life. My mom's departure, and my destination. 

Marsh is the place I still dream about, at age 42, almost a decade after its death. In my dreams I'm still parking my old car, striding past its automatic doors that go hush-hush, wandering its aisles, chilled in its apple-scented air-conditioning. I'm heading out of its doors, waiting at the edge of a barren parking lot, waiting for my husband or looking for my children. Alone. Pensive. Always waiting for my family, wondering where they are. This dream-Marsh, of course, has no bearing on my current life; it perished 5,000 miles away, long after I sold my car. It was forgotten before I married my beloved British man, before we started our family of magnificent hybrid children. It disappeared, in a way, before I ever moved to England; way, way after I ever stopped needing it. 

Who knew a simple grocery store could mean so much? 

So, yes, you can never go home: you carry it with you. 

Marsh may be empty now, all its windows shuttered, its shelves dusty, its aisles full of ghosts. I'm glad my childhood filled at least a little part of it. I'm glad we are those ghosts. That place lived and breathed. I'm hoping my girl-self is still skipping along its empty walls, racing her sister to the toy aisle, where she'll find something to add to her Christmas list. I hoping that little girl is still bouncing in her canvas sneakers at the deli counter, watching those mashed potatoes and gravy, still hot. I would like to tell her that these mundane days, these fleeting grocery shopping afternoons, are going to be the flavour of her childhood, some of the very best moments spent with her mom. Treasured and full. These moments are going to be the rhythm of her life. The unending spool of her needs, her love. But I don't have to. I think she already knows. 

Happy Friday, everyone!