Fruit Salad

Another excursion brought to you by this weeks $30 bananas market basket: fruit salad conditioner.

Before setting out for RantMom's, RantWoman washed her hair. RantWoman has a lot of hair and likes having a lot of hair. She guesses she should be relieved: enough of it is going grey that RantMom has given up trying to pull out all the grey hairs. Anyway all that hair needs shampoo and more importantly, despite mostly residing in RantWoman's preferred French braid, conditioner, which RantWoman just ran out of.

RantWoman forgot about this actually until, trailing after one of RantMom's wanderings, Hair Care products leapt out of the visual fog. By this we mean RantWoman recognized rows of bottles of various colors and picked one up to see what it was. Then she remembered needing conditioner and started scanning the shelf for either the cheap brands or some sale tags.

"Scanning" is a term to be used advisedly here. Scanning, skimming pretty much are not operational verbs in RantWoman's lexicon of functional visual concepts. "Scanning" means picking up bottles at arbitrary intervals, peering at them up very close and repeating until one finds either a brand or a scent one can abide. The first plausible brand scent combo RantWoman found was coconut-scented shampoo and after a couple guesses RantWoman had a bottle of suitably cheap coconut conditioner.

Coconut is not really one of RantWoman's favorite smells, but a funny thing from a long-ago family reunion in Montana made the sale anyway. The long-ago family reunion featured furrener husbands, salt-of-the-earth aging aunts and uncles, and buffalo.

One day while we were assembling for the road trip of the day, one of the furrener husbands was moaning about sunburn and itching skin. A wife was dutifully suggesting sunscreen while an aging aunt was doing that to her husband. Apparently the available sunscreen was something coconut-scented. When dutiful wife asked husband why he wouldn't put on sunscreen, aging uncle blurted out something about because he does not want to smell like fruit salad. Right.

I think that was the day our road trip took us along a road near a small herd of buffalo. Fruit salad sunscreen or no, BOTH of the furrener husbands wanted to go get photographed as close to the massive beasts as possible. The furrener husbands, neither one, had any concept of charging buffalo. Miraculously all the ensuing yelling in three languages not to get that close did not make the buffalo charge and there is photographic proof that both the furrener husbands survived.

To this day RantWoman cannot think of coconut-scented cosmetics without thinking of the buffalo and the grassy smells and the furrener husbands on a warm sunny day one Montana summer and here we have another round of free association travel live from the aisles of your neighborhood grocery emporium.