Robert Frost at Bud's Shop 'n Save

So yesterday, after I'd finished working, I drove to Dexter to see if I could track down any citron for my Dickinson black cake. Dexter is a small town with a small grocery store, but it's been occasionally known to have unexpected items such as basmati rice, and I figured that citron wasn't as long a shot as weird rice from Pakistan.

At noon on a Monday, Bud's is a peaceful place to shop. All the scornful high school checkers are still in class, so the staff consists solely of fiftyish women who lean against their un-busy cash registers and gossip mildly about the weather, and deer hunting, and so-and-so who's up to Bangor to have that balloon thing done to his heart. Nonetheless, odd things do happen at Bud's. For instance, once I was standing in the checkout line behind a very young couple in Amish dress. They couldn't have been older than 20, at least if one judges by the husband's attempt at a manly beard, which was wispy and unprepossessing, to say the least. Anyway, they were buying two items: a dozen eggs and a package of Oscar Mayer baloney. I found this purchase obscurely shocking. Baloney! Shouldn't they be home collecting eggs and hanging hams in the attic? Why were they in Bud's buying cheap lunchmeat?

But yesterday, there were no junk-food-eating Amish couples to distract me. Having, quite unusually, remembered to bring along my reusable bags, I dropped them onto the conveyer belt and started unloading my cart (and, by the way, Bud's does have citron if you're looking for some). Along the way, I happened to glance up, and then I noticed that the bagger was reading one of my bags.

Now, this was a bag I had purchased at the Frost Place last year, merely because I hate the way I look in t-shirts yet felt I should make some donation to a place I love and that is kind enough employ me. It's a black canvas bag with Frost's signature printed on one side and a very short poem on the other. (I won't reprint it here because it's still under copyright, but it's called "The Secret Sits" and is easy to find.)

Anyway, here I was, in Dexter, Maine; here I was, unloading bananas and a gallon of milk onto a conveyer belt at noon on a drizzly November Monday; and not three feet away from me a sweet-faced, middle-aged woman was not bagging my groceries because she was busy reading a Frost poem.

Eventually the woman at the cash register asked her what she was reading on the bag, and the woman who was supposed to be bagging but wasn't said, "I'm reading Robert Frost." And then the woman at the cash register nodded peaceably, as if that were a perfectly understandable thing to be doing while one works a shift at Bud's Shop 'n Save.

So, for a moment or two, we all three shared some cozy smalltalk about Frost and New Hampshire, until I said good-bye and hauled my citron et al. out to the car and went home and made Dickinson black cake.

But think of it! a little conversation about Frost with two clerks at the grocery store! Sometimes this world is more wonderful than we think.