Blue Ridge Country September/October 2020 - 11

MILL CREEK STORIES
a sudden, entire shelves in the grocery stores were bare.
New products? Pffffffft. More like any products?
The entire country became deeply southern in its reaction to hearing that we may have to stay at home because of a severe respiratory virus. Everyone bought milk,
bread and especially toilet paper. Can't get much more
southern than that. Even if our pantries already looked
like a subsidiary of Costco itself, we will head out in an
emergency situation to get those three items. Milk, bread,
and toilet paper are the holy trinity of preparedness and
we are driven, like lemmings, to go get them at any cost if
our routines are going to be even slightly inconvenienced
by weather, illness or holiday traffic.
I myself have a small pantry so it's never overly full.
It took well over a month after lockdown for me to even
consider buying toilet paper. I know the local grocery
store doesn't have any product on their paper aisle, but
surely Amazon does. They have everything. They had
nothing. How much toilet paper does the country have
to buy to empty all the Amazon warehouses? They also
emptied Target, Costco and every drug store I could find.
I struggled to understand how a virus that attacks your
lungs required so much toilet paper.
Once again, I think everyone became honorary southerners. Milk, bread and toilet paper are required, you
know, in case society crumbled and we devolved into a
barter system. Those three items would be worth millions
of dollars in trade. So there was no toilet paper in any

inventory anywhere.
I still had four or five rolls so I was not in crisis yet.
Even if they all disappeared, I spent many a summer at
my great-grandmother's house and she did not have indoor plumbing. There was an out house and there was a
Sears catalogue that served as both reading material and
for personal hygiene. So if worse came to worst, I was
ready to go all "Little House on the Prairie" if I had to.
This would be a character-building experience, like the
Girls Scouts only without the badges.
When we got down to three rolls of paper in the house,
my dear husband got a little nervous. So he took it upon
himself to save the day and find us some toilet paper.
After many hours of earnest searching on the internet, he
had success. He bought an entire case, 48 rolls, of scented
toilet paper. Remember my great-grandmother? Well if
she and 1,000 other great-grandmothers all opened their
handbags in a very small room at the exact same moment, that's the smell of my toilet paper. It is floral and
sweet, and punches you right in the nose with the pungency of fake lavender that wafts out of this case.
I could cook fish for days in this house and you'd never know it. The toilet paper's heavy perfume has filled my
pantry and is oozing out into the hall. When the dogs
head for the back door, they pass the pantry and it just
stops them in their tracks. My pack seems to be saying,
"Yeah, I got to pee but what is that smell? Is great-grandma here?"

Wish you were here...
With more than 500 miles of shoreline filled with parks,
hiking, biking, horseback riding, frisbee golf, picnicking,
and stargazing in green open spaces, Smith Mountain
Lake offers more than water adventure.
When the sun hits the shore, be the seeker.
www.visitsmithmountainlake.com

Filled with

GREEN OPEN SPACES
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020

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Blue Ridge Country September/October 2020

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