Walking as Retracing Steps

Despite how much I love food, going to the grocery store every other week becomes tedious and mundane. It takes up my money and time; I always want to buy more than I can afford. Driving over there, I often experience the “joy” that is New Orleans drivers and usually arrive to the store slightly flustered from avoiding swerving vehicles.

Yet, food is what nourishes us; it gives us the strength and energy to live our lives. It builds a communion between families, houses and friends. Why should going to the grocery store be so draining and agonizing?

My roommate Courtney and I decided to walk through Audubon Park to the grocery store. On our walk, we gawked at all the beautiful and inconsistent architecture, about her colorful friends back in Seattle, about my nervousness of graduating. The weather was beautiful, and we even befriended a particularly large turtle that was attempting to crawl through a fence.

While walking, we were able to notice details of our path that we can never see while driving or even riding a bike, as one is normally too concerned with safety.

We arrived at Whole Foods, though it is not a place I particularly enjoy shopping, and did research on the rhetoric of their products and company values. (To be discussed later). Normally when I’m at Whole Foods, I’m incredibly antsy from busy women nearly running me over with grocery carts and the bustle of particularly unhappy people. Yet, I walked around making fun of green marketing with Courtney and actually enjoyed walking around Whole Foods. We even asked questions to the meat employees about what is locally grown and what cloth-aged cheese is to the cheese employees.

And, for the first time, I walked out of Whole Foods feeling content instead of accosted or robbed. (part of this is because I didn’t buy anything). Courtney and I walked back and even befriended a kitty walking around Calhoun Street.


“For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels” (Thoreau, “Walking”) Perhaps Courtney and I were not “re-conquer-ing” the Holy Land of Audubon Park and Magazine Street, but we were learning to seek the presence of beauty in the space we too often overlook and cannot fully see. By making a walk out of a simple chore, such as walking to the grocery store, we become more able to better appreciate the place we live in and its constant changes, the act of acquiring food for our own nourishment and enjoying the presence of good company, as “half the walk is but retracing our steps.” The other must be to better understand the steps we take so that we can walk further.