When I was a kid, I fell in love with the neighbor’s grocery list. We had no such thing. My mother didn’t care what we wanted. When I asked her why she bought the cookies that everyone hated, she said, “If I buy the ones you all love, then you just eat them all!” It was her job to stock the house with food, but not necessarily to feed us. Except of course that I was small, really weirdly scrawny and small, and everyone always said, jokingly as it was some kind of cultural go-to joke, “Doesn’t your mother feed you?” This made my mother panic. She fed me, alright. I ate and ate. But it wasn’t about the food tasting good. My neighbors though, man, they had food items we’d only dream about — an ice cream freezer in the garage, Big H to smear on your hamburgers (which were massive), Breakfast Bars which actually included chocolate. Nothing generic. All name-brand. Hot chocolate with the mini marshmallows. You’re feeling me. The mother was always dieting, and had a small Weight Watcher’s scale on the counter. But the rest of the family, they were supposed to EAT, and eat well. I went and did my best. But the grocery list itself was a pad of paper with a Boynton hippo cartoon in the corner. The hippo was nude. But I dressed him. I did so thematically. I’d dress him as Elvis with chops and rhinestones or Hawaiian with a ukulele or Flamenco or vampire or as a French painter. I would also add things to the list: love, witty conversation, occasional sarcasm. I did this throughout middle and high school and, surely, the abstractions got weirder and more convoluted. In fact, I easily could have put “convoluted abstractions,” on the list. I think at first I was drawn to the grocery list, conceptually. I was nosey. In this land of plenty, what could they possibly need? Did I mention their shampoos? They smelled of coconut long before it was easy for shampoos to smell like tropical fruits. And they were expensive. They had to be bought at boutiques. But still they were added to the list. The list was magic. They wanted things and things arrived. But since shopping was a nightmare for my mother — who on top of being OCD and slightly phobic about grocery stores was also highly frugal — I assumed that it was also a nightmare for this neighbor. And I imagined her doing this shopping as an act of undying love and perseverance. It was a holy sacrifice. She gave and gave and gave. And as I imagined her out there, flipping the pad of paper to the next page where the list forged on, there was a little gift of the imagination. I imagined her smiling at my Hippo as Viking, my little abstraction — like undiluted joy! — and she would say to herself, Oh, that little Julie Baggott and her whimsy. She brings me such … undiluted joy! It was my little love back at her, and gratitude for all the food I ate. Sometimes I still think of the freezer in the garage — the deep hum, the cold cloud bursting from it when we hefted the lid, the beautiful ice-packed ice cream and not just plastic-tube freezer pops or those Tupperware pops that were just frozen lemonade, no, no, no. I’m talking Klondike bars — high dollar, top end. And, oh, the joy of jumping a little and bumping my ribs up over the lip of the freezer, dipping my hand into that shimmering other world … Did I ever mention this weirdness to my mother? No. She might have read it as a deep betrayal. And did this other mother mention my little habit? No. Was that part of the unspoken love between us? I have to assume yes, but some things are better left unsaid.