Shipping Shopping

In our household most of us have very low incomes. We have enough to buy lovely things, but only if we shop with great care. One of our ruses is staying away from the high street – so we don’t get to see the things we live without perfectly happily until our gaze falls upon them in a shop and suddenly we know – gasp – life has been incomplete!!

Also, we want very particular things. Materials for safely hygenic earth closeting. Pure beeswax candles made with particular attention to the welfare of the bees. Live and unpasteurized sauerkraut. Body lotion with the medically active oleo-resins of frankincense in it, not just the essential oil. Modest dresses hand made in 100% natural fabric by people who work in their own homes not sweat shops. Shawls made from nettles. Ladies shoes in US size 12. That kind of thing. These, you do not find on the high street.

Hence, we do almost all our shopping online.

Also, some of us in our household work from home all the time and all of us some of the time. So there’s usually someone in. As we shop online, this is important because five of us live here, which means most days the postie brings us interesting parcels. It’s like Christmas all the time here – in fact more so than Christmas is because we don’t give Christmas present. All the delivery men and the posties know us and greet us like old friends. Some of our family work in office jobs, so get their parcels delivered to us because there’s always someone home here. We hardly ever go away (and never all of us at once) because who would feed the foxes and the crows if we weren’t here? Or the cats? So the delivery men bring the parcels for neighbours who are out to us, as well. “Do you mind if I – ” “No, go on – leave it in our porch.”

Something I love about this is when a parcel has a tracking facility. I love watching the thing I’m waiting for cross the world.

I’m waiting patiently right now for a dress from Kari Thorne. The last parcel I had from her, I looked up her address on the aerial satellite. Where she lives is all green  - trees and fields and a quiet road that stops at a small rectangle under the trees with Kari and her sewing machine in it. In Wisconsin.

I watched each day as the parcel went to Athens (Wisconsin), then left Athens for Oshkosh and went from there to Chicago, then left Chicago for Detroit, then – getting nearer now – to London.

That dress left London two days ago. London is two hours from where I live by train. I have visions of posties in the sorting office all trying on a modest dress …

Where? Where is it now? Soon …

Online shopping is fun.