Paper or plastic?

I am in the bedroom where I slept every night as a kid, sitting at the pink and white desk I got as a Christmas gift when I was 10-years old. I had always wanted a desk of my own to write at---even then I was romanticizing this being a writer business---and when I walked down and saw this beauty with its pink drawers and white handles filled with rulers and pencil holders and the attached shelving unit that sits on top of it stacked with Christmas presents, I gasped. My very own desk. My very own desk with its flower-bordered desk pad and matching note pad and one of those pen holders that looks all old-fashioned and grown up with the pen standing almost vertically in its stand. My very own desk where I could write letters and stories and do my homework. My very own desk where I would undoubtedly spend countless evening "working" under the glow of a desk lamp. I couldn't believe it was mine.

Of course, I don't remember writing at it all that much as a kid.

I wrote this (honestly, at that desk) two days ago, thinking I would be able to finish and post a blog entry at some point that day. I thought I'd get many things done in these past five days I've spent here in RI---blogging, yoga, coffee with friends---but, of course, I have done none of those things. Except for a hospital trip on Thursday, I haven't even left my parents' house to go further than Clements' Market, the Portsmouth, RI equivalent of a town square. (Today---during my second trip there in three days---I shopped along side my elementary school nurse, the very woman who first taught me about "developing" and supplied me with a pink plastic kit stuffed with maxi pads and panty liners.)

It was a bit of a heartbreak to come home from NH one year and see that Clements' had moved a lot over from its original location (change is never easy) but it expanded into a bright, beautiful market, so booming with business that it now has its own stoplight at the parking lot entrance; this is the big-time in Portsmouth commerce. Not only is Clements' a perfect symbol of small town life and community (the checkout lanes are even named after Portsmouth streets), but it also encompasses all that the words coming home conjure and, in some ways, mean to me.

This is the place from which every homemade meal of my childhood was born. This is where I rode my first conveyor belt at the checkout counter. This is where my mom has earned her points every year towards a free 22-pound Thanksgiving turkey to feed the family. This is the first spot to which I illegally drove my parents' car (on some errand that one of my sister's swindled me into doing...and to which I agreed for obvious reasons). I can actually remember keeping the keys out on the counter rather than hiding them in my pocket, enjoying the maturity that I was sure just having keys chain branded me with. This is where we ran school car washes and set up tables for bake sales. This is where Cherie and I darted from aisle to aisle, hiding from each other and playing games while my mom shopped for what seemed like hours, striking up conversations with whichever friend or acquaintance she encountered at each turn of the cart. This is where I would see teachers from school or friends from dance class. This is where my mom brought me every last week in April to pick out my "birthday cereal"---the only time of the year that we were allowed to have the ultra-sugary version of this breakfast food. (I was always a Lucky Charms girl, enamored as I was buy all the marshmallow trinkets. Cherie opted for Fruity Pebbles---a much better choice taste-wise.)

This is also where Jerry, head of Natural and Specialty Foods, found me the other day and asked, "How's mom doing?" (As I told Molly who was shopping with me, I've known Jerry since I was close to her age.)

During this same shopping trip I ran into a longtime friend of my mom's (who lives just down the street and whose daughter has been a best friend of one of my sister's since kindergarten) and she started to cry as she hugged me hello. She caught herself by surprise with these tears and tried to hold them back in part, I'm sure, for our sake (Katie and Savvy were there too), but I was so grateful for the honesty of her emotion.

Though, kind as these interactions were, I was struck by the fact that my mom had cancer in a world outside the intimacy of the hospital visits with my parents and the phone calls amongst my siblings (and even outside this blog). My mom has cancer at Clements' Market.

A few minutes later, apart from my shopping posse, I had to take a moment to brace myself, standing with my hand against my face, accepting that what had just occurred was real life and not something out of a Meryl Streep movie , which is exactly what it felt like. In some ways, I guess life is feeling more and more like the movies lately. Perhaps this is the stuff of focus and perspective, frame and angle.

I will likely be spending more time at Clements' Market in these coming months than I have in years. Rounding the islands of produce, I stocked the cart with broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries and more---mainstays of the anti-cancer diet. In the endless quest for things I can do at this wholly out-of-my-hands time, I am hoping to keep my parents' refrigerator stocked with such things, at least while I'm around to do so. ("And I don't want to find anything in your napkin," I told my mom last night after serving her a portion of broccoli that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.)

There have been years when I've wanted to avoid Clements' Market; times when my life wasn't looking as I hoped it would and I just didn't feel like explaining this to a kid I once had English class with, or worse, his mother.

But now, for reasons I'm still trying to understand, I am feeling less concerned with things like this and more appreciative of the familiar faces.

A surprise to me, this side of coming home.