Grocery tensions

I've been putting off going to the grocery store, but we finally had to break down and do it tonight. Before leaving the house, there was this exchange:

"I don't want to fight in the produce aisle," I said, "so here's the deal: we just threw away a dozen rotten apples, some petrified oranges and a shriveled-up lemon. I don't want to buy stuff that we're not going to eat."

"Well can you just talk to me without lecturing me?"

"I don't know how else to say it. Look, we're between seasons on fruit. We're way past apple season, we're moving out of citrus season, and the strawberries and blueberries aren't ready yet. On the vegetable front, there's all our potatoes over there. We have onions. I think we could just skip the produce aisle. Would that be all right with you?"

"Okay."

We go straight to the car, drive three minutes to the grocery store, walk in, and she makes a bee-line for the apples. She only puts three in a bag, which is good news, but then she heads for another type of apple and fills a second bag with those. I try to hurry us along to the deli section but she turns back and says, "we need produce." She buys about six different things that Adam and I won't eat and she won't cook even if we would eat them. They will mold in the crisper of the refrigerator until Annie cleans it out on her next visit. 

I know she can't help it. It's a heartbreaking reminder of what's going on in her brain. And the dollar amount is hardly a rounding error in what this disease is going to cost our family. But it kills me to spend money this way. 

There are three other issues built into our shared grocery experience: (1) I have moved uninvited into an area of family life that was always exclusively hers, (2) I tend to buy the same tried-and-true things over and over and she always reaches for the new and unfamiliar, and (3) my objective is to get to checkout as fast as humanly possible while she has no objective other than to savor the endless possibilities on all those shelves. 

On the way to the grocery store, the mood lightened briefly when I looked up into the suddenly cloudless sky and saw the crescent moon and the planet Venus, one day past its brightest state, dominating the western sky. I pointed it out and May was for a moment her old moon-self, and Adam supposed that we were the only people in the world who had ever seen Venus and then wanted to know why we couldn't see Mercury, which he reminded us was on the other side of Venus and closest to the sun. We were in the grocery store for so long that when we came out, Venus had fallen below the horizon and the moon was almost there. May said, "Look at the moon now." Adam stopped to look while I looked but didn't stop and ran over him with a full grocery cart. He tried to play the victim and I told him if he was going to walk in front of the cart it was his responsibility to keep from getting run over. And that's pretty much how it all went...