I hate the grocery store. I think I always have. I have memories as a tween (before that word was coined) and teen, being dragged (not literally) to the grocery store with my mom. I would slink over to the magazine section and look through Teen Beat as long as I could get away with it, then embarrassedly wait in the checkout line before escaping to the car. College wasn’t much better. Sometimes I would go to the grocery store at midnight or after to avoid the crowds. So for a couple years, I have been ordering my groceries online and picking them up. I tried grocery delivery for a while, but it was too hit-and-miss for me. Different “pickers” every week meant one week my order would be perfect, and the next very disappointing.

Now, more than ever, I’m grateful for the Kroger pickup service that used be called Click List. But it’s gotten a LOT more popular. Before COVID-19 and social distancing, I would order Friday night for Saturday or Sunday pickup, or Saturday for Sunday pickup. This week, I ordered Monday and reserved a spot for Sunday morning. There were some spots open on other days, but I like to go in the morning and get it out of the way, so I waited for Sunday. I placed a small order Monday then added it to it yesterday with the bulk of the order. We were almost, but not quite, out of bread, milk, and butter.

We’re going through a LOT of food these days. Three meals a day, seven days a week, makes for a lot of at-home consumption. Last week I spent over $200, and I am not hoarding. This week it was a little more, but I bought some non-food things like paper towels (we were down to our last roll), a lighter (we’re burning candles like we never did before), and body wash. Also, my goal is to not go to the store more than once every ten days. Fortunately, we have a big refrigerator, a stand-up freezer, and a large pantry.

This grocery trip also included items for our Easter meal. Easter is a week from today and even though we can’t celebrate with family or friends like we would prefer, we will still celebrate. Now, as much as ever in my lifetime, we need the Easter story to give us hope. We’ll be having turkey, stuffing, green beans, pecan pie cobbler, and cookie bars. The Easter bunny will come, too. And someday in the future, we’ll celebrate Easter with our family.

My pickup window was 9-10 am, so I set an alarm to get me up at 8:45. I haven’t been sleeping well and was up last night from about 3 am to about 5:30 am. I probably would have missed my window without the alarm. Before I could go to the store, I needed to empty and refill the dishwasher to make room on the counter for the bags of groceries I’d be bringing home. So I probably left around 9:20, and it’s about a 20 minute drive.

On the way to the grocery store, I chose a route that took me by my younger daughter’s school. My older daughter went there, too. It’s a private school with no bus service, so I’ve been driving there most weekdays (often in the summer, as well, for camp) for the past 13 years. And driving by was bittersweet. There was the building, the main entrance, and the parking lot. There also was the memory of the Dime Day charity drive that would never happen, the underused front door, and the new track that would never host a meet this season. Nearly half of the middle schoolers participate in track. It’s unbelievable that they didn’t get to compete this year.

There was some good on the route, too. The most well-used intersection near the school has needed to be repaved for well over a year. It was to the point where people had to drive five or ten miles per hour to avoid damaging their cars. Sometime in the past three weeks, the city strip paved the entire intersection!

The route to Kroger also took me by the Jewish Community Center (JCC). We joined the JCC over a decade ago, when my daughter wanted to go to camp there. We’ve spent a lot of time there in the summers at the water park. And for the past three years, Andrew and I have been there nearly every Saturday or Sunday using the workout room. The JCC has been closed since mid-March. The parking lot was a ghost town.

I decided on the way to Kroger that I might as well fill the tank while I was there. I checked, and the last time we got gas was March 12. I can’t tell you the last time we went two weeks without buying gas. Because we’ve been buying so many groceries I was able to use a $0.60 per gallon discount. And gas was already cheap. I paid $1.09 per gallon and filled the van’s tank for $17.38.

Coming home I used a different route, which took me by two churches. They should have been packed on a Sunday morning, but they were empty of course. I wonder when I will get used to this new normal.

The other weird thing about this morning is it would have been the day we disembarked our cruise. We would have been on the early end of a twelve-hour drive back home so that Ellie could start school tomorrow. I don’t miss that. But I’m sad about the lost Spring Break.

The Lost Spring continues.