Our Chinese elm at sundown (sorry for the dark shot, clicking on it helps.) I think the previous owner liked twisty, interesting trees; I know I do. And it’s an elm. And it has survived.

Meantime.

Something stopped me. You don’t stop there in the middle of a main aisle, especially not on a Saturday afternoon at Costco halfway down from the entrance–someone will careen into you. But I did.

And only in that heartbeat did the people moving around just to the side catch my peripheral vision. And still in that split-second my foot refused to take the next step (and I knew surely I must be blocking people). Why, I couldn’t have told you.

Richard was a bit behind just then looking for a toy for the grandsons. There was a piece on display that I hadn’t even seen as I whizzed down the aisle, pulling my cart behind: a narrow but sturdy-looking wooden display case for putting knick knacks into at a corner with mirrors to both sides, the better to see your stuff, and glass across the front so you don’t have to dust all of that. Triangles of glass to however many feet tall. It was up on a pallet and towering over my head.

And those two hapless men were trying to put a boxed version of same onto their orange flatbed cart and not paying the least attention to the realities of their bodily space just as I suddenly stopped for no reason.

That entire part of the store started and turned, first at my–okay, shriek sounds too dramatic, gasp, not quite enough so as to be honest–and then at the big booming smash as it just missed my head. It hit immediately in front of me.

All I could do was stand and stare.  People all around us tried to take it in. Then at last the nearby employees came running.

All of that glass could have gone shrapnelling everywhere, but none of it seemed to land more than a foot from impact. Kudos to the manufacturer. (Going glass side down definitely helped.)

I did a silent thankyouthankyouthankyou to Above.

The sheepish men with the orange cart melted into the crowd with their prize as, true to form, some random impatient person behind me forced their way around whether there was room for them in the debris and with the employee on his knees there or not.

And everything was as if back to normal.

We got our shopping done, we were getting out; I was tired and went to sit on a bench facing the checkouts as Richard paid for our groceries, and there on the bench was a woman who’d been several carts behind when all that had happened. She looked in my eyes and then shook her head with a rueful smile of Wow. That was close.

And then everything really was back to normal.