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over $300 for one shopping cart of groceries
Sunday, August 7 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Gretchen has been trying for weeks to sell of the bits of mechanical detritus that we've accumulated since buying the brick mansion. Some of that detritus is the result of upgrading systems in the mansion itself, though some of it is from purchases we made that didn't prove useful. This includes that dishwasher and that microwave oven we'd bought from the nice Craigslist lady who turned out to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. This morning, though, somebody came out wanting to buy them both. It was a skinny guy excited about all things mechanical or electromechanical, his fat wife, and his fat-faced kid (whose body was still skinny). The kid was our first visitor who ever professed a greater fondness from Ramona than Neville, though this might've had something to do with Ramona's continued lethargy in the aftermath of having been under general anæsthetic.
Our house sitters arrived at about 10:30am. As always for the last several vacations, Gretchen had found them on a website that matches up people with animals who need to travel with people who are traveling, need a place to stay, and don't mind taking care of animals. Our housesitters this time was Stephanie, a mathematical artist from England and her boyfriend/husband Overstreet, a large-format artist originally from Haiti. They'd both driven up from where they live in Florida. Orginally the plan had been for them to stay for two weeks, since Gretchen had rented our cabin for that long. But then I'd gotten hired by The Organization, and there was no way I could be away from my job for that long. So now Gretchen will be at the cabin for two weeks, but I'll be coming home for the second week.
We gave Stephanie and Overstreet a tour of our house, and while Stephanie had plenty to say, Overstreet didn't say anything until we got to my laboratory. The chaos, clutter, and exhuberance seemed to wake him up. "What, do you do installation art?" he asked. "I'm always making things. And it's good to have a lot of stuff so I will always have that little thing I need," I explained. Overstreet said he could relate to that. Later he asked if I had a miter saw, so we took them all out to the garage to show him the many tools he could use if he needed them. "There's even a welder if you need it," I said, pointing with my foot at a blue box on the ground surrounded by a tangle of wires, hoses, and leaves blown in during one or more previous autumns. The main thing Overstreet would need for his massive paintings would be place to put down a tarp, so we also showed him Gretchen's basement library. I thought his biggest danger would be cats walking across his work, though if he worked in the garage he might also have to face down bloodthirsty mosquitoes.
Later we had coffee and not much else, since Overstreet isn't "much of a sweet-tooth" and Stephanie can't eat a wide range of foods due to her unusual sensitivity to histamines. Overstreet told of arriving from Haiti in the 1980s as a young child and illegal immigrant, and how horrible he was treated in the Florida school system (where the hierarchy of immigrants put Cubans on the top and Haitians on the bottom). "The other kids used to throw rocks at me," he said. Though Overstreet is now a US citizen, he has absolutely no patriotism because of the trauma of his first experiences here. Stephanie, by contrast, had been amazed by America and its wide diversity of landscapes "all in one country." She also got on board with the American dream, that anyone can be anything they want to be. She also found that her middleclass British accent opened doors that might've been closed to even Americans; though, she claims, her family in England had been "white trash," people in America thought she sounded like the Queen.
By noon, the dogs, Gretchen, and I were on the road headed towards the Adirondacks. As always, we stopped for supplies in the greater Albany area. In the past, our suppliers have always been Trader Joe's or Whole Foods, but since then Gretchen had discovered the Honest Weight Food Co-op, a supermarket-sized food coop with everything we could possibly need. We filled our cart until it couldn't hold anything else, concentrating on prepared food, fresh produce, alcohol, and other expensive items, and somehow we managed to spend over three hundred dollars. Gretchen was especially excited about the vegan pizza rolls and the mock chicken salad (with tempeh).
As we approached the cabin north of Minerva, Gretchen realized we'd neglected to harvest lettuce from our garden. So we stopped at a gas/station convenience store/gas station called Sullivan's to see if their billing themselves as a "grocery store" meant they had lettuce (even iceberg would do). They had some sad looking apples, onions, and carrots, but that was the only produce. Fortunately, they also had maxipads, which we needed for a belly-band-based system to prevent Neville from pissing the bed, something he does when it's rainy and he doesn't want to go outside.
"Maybe they'll be a produce stand," I said optimistically, though I knew that unlikely. In a region where 90% of the people strictly adhere to a diet of processed food, there isn't much demand for the strangely-unpackaged things grown in gardens. But then there it was, a pick your own produce place! We got some semi-bolted lettuce, some leaves of Swiss chard, a couple green and jalapeño peppers, and even a cucumber (for me; Gretchen can't stand them). The produce stand even said we could fill up our five gallon job from their hose, thereby meaning we didn't have to drive all the way to the Minerva Lake campground to get water there (the water at the cabin is pumped directly from the lake and is not potable).
When we arrived at the cabin, it was as we remembered it, though the weather was a little colder than it would've ideally been. Gretchen went for an immediate swim and I paddled the kayak around the lake to see if the beavers had returned (they hadn't). Soon thereafter, I climbed into bed and took a long nap.
I awoke into twilight and stayed up a little longer, but the semi-offgrid pattern of life at the cabin compels one to go to bed shortly after dark.
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