| OCR Text |
Show other people's dry goods. Things my mother never would have bought at the commissary: raspberry Jell-O, dried manicotti shells, unfamiliar brands of baking powder. Refugees from the shelves of neighbors who had recently relocated to military bases in other parts of the country, they always had the feel of the exotic. I would marvel at how my mother would transform the tubes of pasta into something more familiar, slip the Jell-0 into a cake mix without my ever knowing it was there. Slowly the supply would dwindle and with it the memory of the family that had left the goods behind. In our turn, we, too, would gather the staples that we could not finish before moving and load them into the red wagon to carry across the street to other neighbors. Sometimes I wondered if we weren't just circulating the same items, a box of Carnation dried milk and a half-used bag of cornmeal uniting military families stronger than any shared sense of duty. When you had given away your dry goods, you knew that the end was near. Clean the house for final inspection, a few days in a hotel on TLA and then off to a new state, a new house, a new school. Maybe for this reason I always felt protective of the things our neighbors gave us. Though the items were often unfamiliar to me, I knew what they meant for those who had just given them up. Continually asked to leave things behind, it is amazing how attached you become to salt. 129 |
