Finding Beauty in Every Face & Place – Walmart

This last week, like any other week, when I walked in the Walmart, I grabbed a shopping cart. It’s just what I do when entering the doors.  The one I grabbed first, I returned after a few steps because it was so hard to steer because the wheels seemed to be locked in a sideways position and I was trying to move forward toward the produce/floral department.  The second one that I got had a piece of paper in it; but, I was on a mission to get in and get out, so the piece of paper did not distract me from my list and checking items off of it as I made my way around the store.  After everything I’d planned to purchase was in the cart, I headed to the self checkout and rang up and bagged my items.  It was only when I started to put my bags back in the cart did I take the time to pause and read the yellow sticky note in the cart.  I figured it was someone else’s shopping list.  But, as I read it, it look like the print was from a child’s hand and the best I could tell it said:

I love yo mo so so so so mu

I then leaned my readers closer to the yellow sticky note and could see the scrunched “m” at the end of “mo”, making it mom.  The very last word became “much” upon this closer inspection of the “ch” being fit into a very small space at the end.  Though I had quickly moved through the store, I had a few moments with the message on this sticky note while in the self checkout area, and I read it again with the tiny letters added:

I love yo mom so so so so so much

How precious.  It was a love note from a child to a mama!

I thought of my own daughters and the fact that they were both writers and seemed to have a way with words.  I thought of the oldest who wrote all the time and at a very early age wrote a poem that we all celebrated like it had been published by the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  Or how about the time she wrote a book?!? And then there was the time we both submitted devotionals to be published.   I think of how much words have meant, and mean, to her.  I think of our youngest that was inclined to write all of us notes.  I can remember when she had just learned to write and she wrote her sister a note with one of those chunky crayons and included some money in the envelope for her to be able to go to a movie with a friend.  I thought of the earmarked piece of paper that I still have clipped to my memo board in the kitchen with words of love from her.  I think of another note that her dad and I were just talking about last week that she left him on his work bench. We still laugh about that one because there was a very innocent misspelling in that note!

There in those moments, right there at the Walmart self-checkout area, I relived some wonderful memories of handwritten notes I’d received from my daughters. I read the jumbled letters on the yellow sticky note again and thought of the love-note-days at our home and smiled.

I slowly placed another bag in my cart as if this yellow sticky note were now a centerpiece on a table in a grand hall.  I wondered if the child who penned this note wrote it while riding in the cart, or if the mama had brought it along with her to the store because it meant so much to her… I may never know; but, what I do know is that I had found beauty in a place I’d not expected it…at the local Walmart. As I thought of the distance that separates me and my note writer and my book writer, I decided to snap a picture of this beautiful note and leave its words of love and beauty for the next mama to find.  She may need it as much, or more, than I did today.

There is beauty all around us.