Nuns at Trader Joes

I’ve stopped off on the way to the neurologist to get her and her office staff some flowers to say, Thank you for saving my life.

On the sidewalk outside I smell a strange perfume of garbage and food and plants and exhaust. It reminds me of somewhere else, like Mexico, and I think of how the perfumes of a place are much dependent on climate and how much garbage service a country has, how a culture deals with its waste.

At the doorway I meet two beautiful nuns, one round, one tall, in the doorway. Dressed in their traditional and old fashioned black and white robes.

I choose a small woven green basket of purple campanula, dense with bell shaped blooms. I choose it over other things precisely because it is compact and without fragrance and will not harm the neurologically sensitive.

Then I think, cookies, and I go and find some short bread with apricot and raspberry jam.

I go through the check-out line of a nice man named Mike B and he comments on the flowers and lifts them to his face and tries to smell them. I say I don’t think they are fragrant. He agrees. “I think you are right. But my wife lost her sense of smell and she always asks me to describe how everything smells.”

I inquire further. It turns out a year ago she fell and hit the back of her head and was in the ICU for a long time. She recovered but her sense of smell and taste never came back.
He says there is research going at the university in Pennsylvania but she is not eligible because they don’t handle folks who have lost senses due to physical trauma. I tell him my own head is strange and I am on my way to the neurologist, and don’t give up hope, we may all get answers yet, and our brains may heal.

I don’t see the nuns again but I love the idea that they are out there,
And they are shopping at Trader Joe’s.

I wonder what my favorite nun Sister Wendy Beckett is doing these days?

My right side head is still misbehaving.
How did pain and I get to be on such a first name basis?

But look how well I am doing. I can think, walk, drive, eat, talk, listen.
And none of this is taken for granted.