Scene: Trader Joe’s. I was wearing a plain shirt and this gerdan.

The woman in front of me at checkout looked over at me, decided I looked friendly enough to engage in conversation, and exclaimed, I just love that!

She tried to get back to the task at hand but ended up saying it again.

I told her a woman in Ukraine had made it for me.

“I’m from Ukraine!” She asked me who I’d bought it from, but I explained that the woman had lived in Kherson and had evacuated and I didn’t know where she was now.

She asked, with some hesitation at first, if she could touch it?

Sure!

She felt the beads: yes of course glass, not plastic. Could she take a picture of it? She loved it so much!

Sure!

She did, and I wondered if she was a beading artist herself or was close to someone who was; she was texting the joy of the moment via her phone with someone whom it would mean something to, too. All artists need that spark renewed from time to time.

And everybody far from home needs to feel welcomed and a part of their new community.

The guy finished checking her out and she headed on out the door, beaming at having run into someone who knew what those were, who’d interacted with her countrywomen, who cared about her country during this war and who was making that part of her culture visible here. She was just about dancing.

And that, I said to the guy now checking me out, is why I wear these even to the grocery store. I have several of them. There are quite a few Ukrainians in the community.

He glanced out the door after her and for the first time in this long wearying Saturday rush, he was now smiling, too.