Sunday Poem #11: Maybe grocery stores are thin places.
A poem for the little autumn joys + an invitation for all the poets
Happy Sunday, friends. After a summer hiatus, it’s time to bring back the Sunday poem! Trying out a bi-weekly rhythm for October, in anticipation for November Poem-a-Day. Here’s a little untitled something I wrote last fall, and a whole essay to go with it.1
Maybe grocery stores are thin places. Listen close and you may hear the voice of God delighting over September apples.
There are so many ways to mark the start of autumn. Is it the arrival of pumpkin spice lattes on every coffee shop menu? One more cookout on Labor Day weekend? School buses rolling through the neighborhood and the smell of fresh sharpened pencils? The equinox, a chill in the air?
All of them, maybe. But I’d also add the day that you walk into the grocery store and the produce shelves are overflowing with little 5 pound totes of apples.
They’re smaller than the ones you buy right off the shelf and labeled with poetic names — Cortland, Braeburn, Pink Lady, Gala, and Macintosh. I thought I didn’t care for apples much, but maybe I was getting the wrong ones. Or maybe they actually do taste better in the Northeast, closer to the orchards, in their season.
Around this time every year, I find myself at the local Market Basket buying the usual things, and I spot the piles of apples. There’s usually a text to Chris (THEY HAVE MACS), and I grab a generously overflowing bag. Last year, as I was checking out, the cashier let out a little squeal as she weighed and scanned them. ”Oh my gosh! These apples! They’re so cute!”
And well, she’s right. Maybe even more than that.
***
I’ve long loved the idea of thin places, where the temporal and mundane meet the eternal and wondrous. And it’s easy to think of the thin places I’ve seen at the edge of the sea, under a canopy of trees, or maybe even at a wedding or a concert or a really good meal.
I don’t typically think of grocery stores as such a place. There are crowds (depending on the timing), clanking carts, fluorescent lights, so many smells and sounds and tinny speakers blasting pop music from over 20 years ago.2
But there are also neighbors running into each other, teenagers laughing and chatting in Spanish as they stock the aisles, old songs that you subconsciously catch yourself humming.
I think of Thomas Merton in a Louisville shopping district, “overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”3 For a moment, the cashier isn’t just a kid with a name tag trying to make it to the end of her shift. She’s a neighbor, probably living somewhere in my own city. And together we are noticing that apples are kind of a miracle.
Merton concluded, ”There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” But I guess I can try, with a handful of lines.
🍻 Poetry Pub News
My inner poet gets really hyped up in October. Here are a few things you should know:
Twice a year, The Poetry Pub Writing Community is open to new members, and October is one of those times! If you are still hanging around on Facebook and would like to join a friendly community of poets, click on over and request to join.
And speaking of poetic community… November Poem a Day is quickly approaching. At The Poetry Pub, We’ve put our own twist on this long-running Writer’s Digest tradition, releasing a set of themed prompts every year that will eventually become a community chapbook. So another reason to join the community: we’ll be announcing this year’s theme and brainstorming prompts soon!
Shoutout to
, host of #twentywordtuesday on Instagram, for encouraging super short writing.That particular feeling when you catch yourself humming along to “The Reason” by Hoobastank while you’re checking the contents of an egg carton, and you realize songs that came out after you graduated college are now grocery store music.
As a displaced northerner who grew up around Michigan orchards and now lives in East Texas, I can attest that apples are better up north. I rarely see Macs around here, much less Jonathan apples. Sigh! It’s slightly depressing when the best option for pies are Granny Smiths.