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12 I managed a grocery 40 minutes west of town. It was a warehouse. It was a place you could direct a letter toward. I had an office where I would read and my office was also full of food. On the outside, the bottom half of the building was painted. The top half was a natural white. When our shifts ended the staff and I would look back at it and consider it a thing that could be broken effectively. Then, the union came in and insisted: vests or aprons over blue jeans. “Or” was policy. They wrote it in the aisles in a script that approximated my handwriting. It was summer, and both parties moved in a direction of interconnectedness. The soup display was allowed also to occur in the dairy section. An ambiguity arose and through debate, I was permitted to drop a partner inside. I did so, and named her my cousin, Susan. With the market running so well, we coached each other in child-rearing because we were self-assured experts. She would say, “the cheese aisle,” and I would find a manner in which “the cheese aisle” could repeat. She was sunburned. She sat long sessions on the curb waiting for her ride. Together, we pushed a shopping cart into the cattails at the edge of the lot. We pushed it on the half-path and on the footbridge across the Mill River. Ice clung in the eddies and the current curved the ice. It was bright out, and we were working through it. RURAL MANAGEMENT ...

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