Chapter Six: Pandemic Shopping
April 20, 2020
Dear Diary,
Today marks the children’s first day of Spring Break so thankfully my governess duties are on respite. In a confounding turn of events, this does not translate to my having more free time, but rather, more time to devote to my second most time-consuming responsibility, the acquisition of food supplies.
In my previous life, Diary, I used to pop into the grocery store nearly every day to pick up whatever I intended to prepare for dinner and perhaps a few snacks. There was never too much forethought involved and nary a large tab to pay. I had the luxury of picking up whatever looked the freshest and piqued my interest at that moment. Now I feel as though weekly grocery shopping for my family of five requires the tactical and operational planning skills of a four-star general.
For the last five weeks, we have relied on a weekly delivery from Instacart. The two panic grocery shopping sprees we took the first week of March were enough to sustain us for the first two weeks of quarantine, but at some point around March 20th, we realized we would need more food and were astounded to discover that Instacart’s previous two-hour delivery window had become a 5 day delivery minimum. I placed an order nevertheless and then spent the next five days anxiously fretting over whether my shopper would even be able to find any of the provisions I had requested.
The big day finally arrived and thankfully, the store was well-stocked and we were able to receive nearly everything on our list, albeit via a contactless delivery to our front porch with my driver’s license taped to the front door to age-verify myself for the copious amounts of wine I had ordered.
Once our hero shopper had left, I went outside bearing rubber gloves and bleach-spray and disinfected the hell out of all of the groceries, which led to other concerns about whether or not the bleach could penetrate the milk carton and whatnot, but I digress. To add insult to injury after all this effort, no less than five minutes after I had put everything away, the children emerged to declare that there was nothing to eat!
Anyways, Diary, it’s a new challenge to sort out, like all the others, but at the end of the day, we still have food to put on the table, so things could be far worse.
Sincerely,
Maya