The First of May

It was in the produce department that things began to get strange.

We'd gone out to the grocery store, late, but not too late. It was only about 9 PM, but the store was much emptier than you'd expect, even at that hour. There was hardly a shopper to be seen.

Even so, there was nothing especially peculiar about this, nothing uncanny - it was a Sunday, after all - and we went about our shopping the way we usually do. We picked up bread and milk, and found a coupon for free barbecue sauce and White Wing tortillas if you bought a 12 pack of sausages. A good deal, but no sign that anything weird was afoot.

We wound our way round past the wine and cheese, down toward the produce, and it was then that the feeling of loneliness really became apparent, an almost aching sense of solitude.

I said to my spouse (who's used to this by now) "do you feel that?" He nodded and said, "yeah, it's like we're the last people on Earth."

It was maybe an odd thing to think about while staring down a bunch of carrots.

We continued to shop, carefully picking over the cherries and nectarines, but the feeling grew more intense, more haunting. Colors took on new vividness. The corners seemed to close around us in a silent, secretive way. In short, it was beginning to feel like that well-worn but still mysterious phrase, "the thinning of the veil."

Of course, this phrase is something one might associate with frosty fields on Halloween, or nature walks on Summer evenings. Grocery stores, not so much. But there it was. My spouse jokingly said as much as we walked out the door with our bags. "It doesn't normally seem like the produce department might be another dimension."

Outside in the parking lot, though, this strange atmosphere was everywhere. So quiet and lonely, with a tinge of something more nebulous. The cars in the parking lot might as well have been abandoned, all signs of life gone missing. Below the hill, the city lights blazed enthusiastically, so it couldn't have been that the whole town was asleep. It was not even 10 o'clock at night, yet it was just like - as my husband pointed out - 2 or 3 AM.

On the drive home, we speculated about causes. The weather was cooler, maybe, but no mist or fog. What was it that might have changed? We noticed that all the lights looked...different. Different how? Just different. We tried to put a word to it, some adjective, and failed. Just somehow noticeably, but indescribably, different.The Shell station on the corner shone like a beacon with this eerie light, and I wondered about the clerks inside working, if they'd had been affected by the loneliness, too.

After we arrived home, we sent our 14 year old around back to put out the bins. When he came back in a while later, he pulled me aside. He said, "Mother, this might sound strange...but you know how they say that plants have feelings? Well, I got this strong feeling outside tonight that the plants, all the vegetation, are lonely. Call me crazy, but that's how it feels."

He'd picked it up, too, that loneliness. As for his theory,  I could not really disagree with him. It was as good an explanation as any. It was May Day, after all.

It's not so hard to imagine that what we all sensed that night was the primeval force of nature, roving across the land, searching high and low for its May Queen.