Sitting in an optometrist's waiting room with Moby-Dick and People magazine and near-sighted old farmers, and imagining that I'll have to wear glasses all the time now, and worrying about how that change will affect my unquenchable vanity, and wondering when I'll ever get old enough to stop fretting about how I look, and being relieved that I don't have to drive in the snow, and complaining that I can't find my favorite red gloves, and losing the grocery list in the bottom of my purse, and dropping Moby-Dick in the banana aisle, and noting that the fish at the fish counter always looks exactly the same, and hoping that it really isn't exactly the same, and forgetting again that the store's been reorganized, and looking for wine in the toothpaste aisle, and not buying a York Peppermint Pattie at the checkout counter, and recalling the year I put one of them into James's Christmas stocking except that I changed the label so that it read Pork Peppermint Pattie, and being relieved that my children think that Christmas should be hilarious and that I'm not the sort of parent who videotapes her children while they unpack their stockings, and remembering too late that I've once more forgotten my reusable grocery bags, and retracing my 20 miles back to Harmony watching crows float over the snowy cornfields, and the clouds shudder above the pellet plant, and giant airless plastic snowmen swoon on the gravel driveways, and guys in plow trucks mutter past me, not plowing, not sanding, not doing anything but driving around, maybe hunting for snow or killing time until their shifts are over; I have no idea, but I push Etta James into the CD slot and keep going.