Eight Limes, No More: The Accidental Poetry of Found Lists
July 15, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 13,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
Mira Ptacin | Longreads | July 15, 2025 | 2,692 words (10 minutes)
I.
A few weeks ago, in the chaos of a Trader Joe’s parking lot, I found a stranger’s grocery list stuck to my windshield. It was raining out, and hard. My insides matched the outsides and the weather mimicked the current climate of the world: gray and full of despair. The small square of paper had most likely been blown by the early spring wind, and it stuck to my car like a soggy postage stamp.
overnight oats
eight limes, NO MORE
melatonin and cheap bday card
red peppers (organic!)
wine x3/a fancy beer for Carla?
p.s. swing by Mom’s on the way home
I peeled the list off the windshield and held it like an artifact: evidence of a life I didn’t know but suddenly cared about. It read like a poem. A confession. What was the story behind this list, I wondered—and what would come for this stranger after the checkout aisle? I slid the paper onto my dashboard to dry, then drove home in silence, bypassing NPR and my usual habit of letting the latest Trump-induced catastrophe fill the air. This scrap of paper was an accidental gift. It granted me a sacred pause. And in that pause, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time: wonder.
There’s a strange intimacy to a stranger’s grocery list; a found scrap of paper is a rare analog window into someone else’s needs. It’s an accidental autobiography, a blank space to be filled with one’s imagination. Unlike the retail hauls or spotless fridge tours found on social media, these lists are unedited and often a little unhinged. In a found list, you learn someone needed batteries, frozen peas, cough drops, and three pickles. Not a jar, but three. Not five limes, eight! It’s haunting. It’s oddly moving. It’s the kind of detail that lodges in your brain and quietly tells you: Someone else is out here trying. Finding a list is not voyeurism, it’s proof of life. It’s story.
II.
In college, I majored in anthropology. Not for the bones, but for the people. Their habits, their habitats, their quiet arrangements of things. I remember my first ANTHRO 101 course, how my professor showed us The Wrath of Grapes, a documentary about the pesticide poisoning of grape workers, about Cesar Chavez and his plight. I remember how I was so hooked, so thrilled that I’d found my people, my crowd, the ones who cared deeply about the stories of other people and their wellbeing, almost to the point of obsession. I remember how it took me a while to process that the word “anthropology” meant “the study of humans” and that that could mean anything. Indeed, my professor reassured me, studying humans, something I’d always done, however informally but passionately, could be my career. Every human was a story to me, and I’d always been attuned. Before long, I left my home state of Michigan and boarded a boat that would spend many months circumnavigating the world to “study humans.”
The destinations: Cuba, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Singapore, India, China, Japan. It was on the last leg of this journey, in Osaka, where I made a collect call to tell my family that I was finally coming home, but not long. Rather, for just enough time to unpack, repack, and head to my next destination: the desert steppes of Mongolia.
III.
That summer, I was the lone woman on a sun-scorched dig at the edge of the map. Twenty-five years old, sunburned, uncertain. A research assistant for the University of Pittsburgh, a job that had been pitched as adventure, science, discipline. We were to investigate cemetery sites from nomadic Xiongnu tribes to figure out what was buried under giant mounds of rocks—was this a cemetery? If so, did this disprove the fact that these were nomadic tribes? (And were they for humans, or their revered horses?) The mounds were enormous; whoever built them would have needed to stay put for many, many months. What was the story here? This project seemed very noble and intellectual on paper. This was anthropology, archaeology specifically; we were going to learn the story before the story. But before that land and its stories, there was a list. I signed the contract and wrote my own packing list for the adventure: one tent, one sleeping bag, water purification tablets, Tang, sunscreen, utility knife, and, theoretically, courage.
A month later I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, which looked like the inside of a rusted-out suitcase flung open under an enormous blue sky. The city was half concrete, half tent, and the air carried the smell of burnt plastic and boiled meat. I was given my orders and sent straight to the bazaar with another list, someone else’s. This one felt less like a list and more like a dare. Survival items, not preferences. Tang again, enough onions for two months, carrots, potatoes, oil, a wok, jugs for water, toilet paper, tarps to cover us during sandstorms, rope to tie down what might otherwise disappear. I understood the logic. Lists are how we fight chaos with ballpoint pens.
I tried my best at the bazaar. I bartered in gestures, wide eyes, a furrowed brow, subtle head tilt, arms crossed, mouth agape—what I assumed was the universal sign for “Is this really the price?” I bought what I could carry. I didn’t get everything.
That night in our hostel, the five men and I gathered to go over our tasks. The kitchen was tight with the smell of mare’s milk and vodka, unwashed men and judgment. The conversation about the grocery list turned into a meeting, then an indictment: I had overspent, underbought, failed logistics 101. We moved on. Next, the men spoke of how to acquire a retired Russian military vehicle for our journey out to the field. It sounded less like budgeting and more like scheming, more like “how to exploit the locals without making it obvious,” and I said something to that effect, which they didn’t like. One archaeologist named Mark from Youngstown, Ohio, turned on me first, voice low and cold: “What do you even know?” When I rebutted, he followed with terse dismissal. “Shut the fuck up.”
The kitchen was tight with the smell of mare’s milk and vodka, unwashed men and judgment.
I didn’t know much. I was 25 to his 40. But I knew enough to bristle at conquest. I knew enough to feel that something was off with these men and their maps and their lists and appetites, declaring this ancient land a sandbox to plunder. They didn’t care about the people of the land and their stories; what they cared about was subjugation. And with this, I gave up, went to bed early, and rolled away from the world. I pulled the scratchy blanket over my face and tried to disappear into sleep.
Sometime after midnight, Mark climbed into my cot and tucked his body behind me. His breath close to my cheek, his hands closer, he rubbed my earlobe between his fingers and said, “Tracy likes that.” Tracy was his wife. This was his version of an apology. I was disgusted; I had never invited him into my bed or my space. I got up without speaking, went to the kitchen, lit one of the stray cigarettes on the table, and smoked until I felt real again, poking my head in every few puffs to see if Mark had gone back to his cot.
The next morning, I told our dig leader what had happened. That I couldn’t go into the field with a man who didn’t understand boundaries. That I didn’t feel safe. The dig leader, a lauded professor of East Asian museum studies, told me if I wanted to be an anthropologist, I had to be tough, and that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. He suggested I “take a bubble bath and think it over,” but if I really wanted to quit, he would help me find my way back to Beijing. Instead, I never saw him again. He disappeared before I did.
IV.
A list is a survival mechanism. A map, a compass, a prayer. I hardly had directions home from Mongolia to Kalamazoo, Michigan, but I scribbled my own: Ulaanbaatar → Zamyn-Uud → Erlian → Jining South → Shlingzi West → Beijing. 1,170 km kilometers. 727 miles.
Back then, I only spoke two Mongolian words: “thank you” and “cheese.” The Mongolian language is difficult to fake; its words sound like wind scraping over bone, quiet clicks, a magic spell. A kind stranger got me black market train tickets. The ride would be 31 hours, if we were lucky. We were not lucky. It was a rickety route that passed through the Gobi desert overnight, our train car’s window cracked open just a hair. The sun woke me in the morning, train still rolling, my mouth slightly ajar and my face caked in sand.
Eventually I arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport and bought a ticket home to Chicago. I had two days to kill before my flight. How dirty I was, how I looked like Charlie Brown’s friend Pigpen, but still, a clean Italian businessman named Danilo who sold high-end textiles found me in the airport, told me how beautiful my hands were, booked me a room at the Four Seasons and paid for it. I was young but cautious, and considered his actions a penance for Mark’s. Danilo took me salsa dancing, bought me dinner. We bought a kite and flew it in a park. I named the kite Tortellini.
I vaguely remember one of the evenings after we’d eaten an enormous meal. It was the night before I was to fly home, and we were sitting outside on a bench on a crowded Beijing street. Danilo had laughed at something I said, something I hadn’t meant to be funny. My reflex was to be offended, but I caught myself before I fell into that moment, and waited. Paused.
Instead, I felt an unfamiliar warmth for this kind man. He was seeing me, without judgment. I didn’t have to defend myself. It was okay to be absurd. I was funny—existence itself was, in that moment. I wasn’t performing, wasn’t bracing for disappointment. I was just there. I softened, even though I didn’t know what to do with that softness; it seemed dangerous, like laying down my weapons in unfamiliar terrain.
In his kindness, in his love for women, Danilo undid what could have been a lifelong distrust for men, particularly after Mongolia. Undid a blossoming self-hatred, a hot shame at having given up. He showed me another way: to enjoy life, to voice my needs, to walk away if something isn’t serving me and find something else that was. And still, I still came away with a story.
Even more than the story was the cause and effect, the silver lining to the fiasco of the dig. I learned I didn’t want to own things, didn’t want to dig up other people’s lands. I could sit quietly and observe anywhere, and anywhere I could find a story. It just took a breath. A pause. In the weeks that followed, some part of me kept waiting for the switch—for the cost, the twist, the punishment for letting go. But days passed and nothing bad happened. And I started to realize I didn’t have to grip so tightly. Maybe letting go wasn’t giving up. Maybe it was just letting go.
V.
Decades have passed since that strange, bright hiccup in Asia, a moment that might have rerouted me, might have tethered me to someone else’s path. Two loud men, one generous and one less so, could have convinced me I was meant to trail in the wake of another man’s story. But instead, that moment unfastened something in me. It flung me forward, not into romance, but into authorship, writing down the list of my own life, finding my own voice, telling my own story. Since then, I’ve coaxed tales from the crumpled margins of life’s grocery receipts and bus stop benches for stories, even books. I’ve chased down the ghosts of psychic mediums, examined the raw edge of abortion, mapped the quiet menace of neo-Nazis, and found strange grace in the business of funeral homes. I married. Birthed two wild and dazzling children. Bought an 1860s farmhouse on a spit of Maine granite, once the domain of a shipbuilder and his salt-scrubbed kin. I filled this home with life, second- and third-hand furniture, created a gentlewoman’s farm: two rabbits, seven chickens, three cats, one dog, and a garden that tries its best. My mornings are a gentle choreography of domestic ambition: feed the creatures, make breakfasts for all, pack small lunches, run the trail that laces through spruce and sea fog. Then: write, teach online, read, walk, read again, make dinner.
I could sit quietly and observe anywhere, and anywhere I could find a story. It just took a breath. A pause.
At 45, mine is a quiet, feral happiness. I rarely leave the island; why would I? Every Monday, though, without fail, I board the ferry, cross the bay, and go to town. “Going to America,” is how we islanders call it. “Going abroad.”
VI.
I have spent approximately 572 Mondays in prison. For over a decade, every Monday, I take a boat from my island to head to “America,” passing lobster buoys and foghorns, the old shipyard bones, black-eyed seals, and knife-beaked loons. In the summertime, giant cruise ships spit out wide-eyed tourists onto the sidewalks, their feces into our bay. When I get to America, I drive inland 40 minutes or so to a low-slung building where the doors lock behind me. There, I teach memoir writing to incarcerated women. It is not glamorous and it is not tragic. It is simply, deeply, human.
We begin with lists. Not essays, not open wounds. Lists. List your morning routine. Your bedtime ritual. List the objects on the nightstand. Sometimes we step it up a notch: write a list of directions to your childhood home. Next, rewrite this list, pausing along to give anecdotes of your childhood. Memories of one’s past: the color of a mailbox, the sound of gravel under tires, the scent of lilacs, a dog behind a fence that made you afraid. A list, after all, is a confession. We do not write in typeface. We write in loops and hesitations. In ink smudges. In cursive, if we remember how. Each list is a thumbprint. Each paper a window.
VII.
In literature, a list is a gift of value. First, and most obviously, lists give the reader white space, a sense of respite, a break in the current. Think: Gatsby’s list of party guests. Think: the epic lists in Ulysses’s “Cyclops” chapter. Think of Didion’s minimalist packing list (which contains three lists within the list) in the The White Album:
TO PACK AND WEAR:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste
Basis soap razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions,
Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oilTO CARRY:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key
Lists let the light through. They defer to the reader’s imagination instead of commanding it. They say: Here is a clearing, stop here. A list hints, does not tell the reader what to think, but puts trust in the reader to rely on their own observations. A list defers to the reader’s intelligence, and allows the reader to experience her own moment of recognition: There I am, too. Lists behave like sheepdogs to the wandering mind. They create rhythm, rupture, breath. They bring you to the now. A good list lets you overhear something private, creates pause. And from that pause, wonder.
VIII.
This is my eighth lime, no more. The end of my list. The last item, the final tick. This list has now fallen into your cupped hands; it is your turn now to recognize and greet it, to cradle what is ordinary and see what is reflected to you from the strange choreography of life. Let smallness be your guide. For this is love, and nothing else. Not perfection. Not transcendence. This is the pause. The pause. The pause. The pause.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
Mira Ptacin is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul as well as the genre-blending book The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna, which the New York Times lauded as a best book to read during a pandemic. Her work appears in The Atavist, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, Lit Hub, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Down East, and more.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/15/eight-limes-no-more-found-lists-poetry/
via IFTTT
Watch