Diving Into the Grocery Store

Migrating Blue Birds visiting my home in Virginia

So, it's done.  I am a Florida resident.  Not only a Florida resident, but a Boca resident!  Goodbye, Blue Ridge Mountains...it's been a pleasure!  I will miss your autumn foliage, and your rolling landscape.  I will miss your down home, earthy appeal.  I will miss the home you've so willingly given me and my family.

I won't miss your cold and snowy winters.  

Ok well, maybe just a smidgen.  I do enjoy Hot Chocolate and roaring, cuddle inducing fires.  

Anywhoooo....

So, Florida it is.  I like Florida.  Sunshine is my favorite.  LOVE Disney World.  No, I mean really.  Some say I'm certifiable.  I just say I'm finely tuned into the magic.  Still, I find myself three hours away from there and in a place so foreign to me I am not convinced it's really in the United States.  It's....tropical.  The water is azure blue and lizards run amok.  Like, I just flew to the islands and somebody better hand me a frozen drink with an umbrella, if they know what's good for them...and darn it- where is my sundress and flip flops????  What do you mean I have to make my own bed and cook dinner?  I am obviously in the Caribbean, so I must be on vacation.  Ta Da!

I want pillow chocolates.

Moving in, unpacking boxes, decorating my new home, putting chocolates on my own dern pillow...have all been kind of surreal.  The worst thing, though?  

Grocery shopping.

You get a good cross section of the population when you grocery shop.  There are the mega-riche elderly ladies with shopping companions.  The "not quite as elderly but you really can't tell" ultra thin women whose faces don't move are in the next category.  The other moms...slender, put together...maybe a botox injection or two...push their carts and eye my buggy- and me- unapologetically. There are the very fashionable gay men who look better than anyone, and look down on no one.  The couples in bathing suits and cover-ups, smelling of coconut fill in the rest of the spaces, as well as your olfactory sense --- see THEY are on vacation!  I bet they get pillow chocolate.

Then there's me.  

A Mountain Mama.  No stranger to hard work.  Kids free to be contradistinctive.  Bare fingernails that may or may not have been bitten off.  Bare faced, product-free hair.  Ice cream in my shopping cart.  No...not even frozen yogurt.  Oh...plus I jiggle when I walk.

I think that if I saw a slightly haggard young mother towing an infant and a toddler, hair askew, with this mornings cheerios still stuck to her butt (you know, a normal grocery shopper) - I do believe I would hug her like a long lost friend!  

I'm too old to assimilate to superficial standards.  Too set in my down-to-earth Virginia ways.  Too much in love with real butter.  Who knows, sticking out like a sore thumb could have it's advantages!  As Tracy Turnblad from Hairspray says,

 "I think I've kind of been in a bubble... thinking that fairness was gonna just happen. It's not. People like me are gonna have to get up off their fathers' laps and go out and fight for it."

Let's see if any standards get redefined.

I think this may be the start of a pretty big adventure!

XO, Ami