The morning I drove to Brookings, I cleaned the kitchen first. I wiped down the counters, put away the breakfast dishes, started a load of towels. I told Gerald I had errands. He said, “In Brookings?” and I said, “Lisa wants me to pick up something,” which was technically not a lie but was not the truth either, and Gerald has been married to me for forty-four years and knew it.
The drive is about an hour from Aberdeen. I had the radio on low — WNAX out of Yankton, farm reports — and I rehearsed what I would say when I got there. I had my medical card in a manila envelope in my purse.
The parking lot was half full. I pulled into a spot near the back, turned off the engine, and sat there. I put on my sunglasses, which was absurd — it was January, overcast, maybe twenty-two degrees. I was not hiding from the sun. I was hiding from the idea that someone might see Carol Bjornstad, church treasurer, Farm Bureau volunteer, grandmother of six, walking into a cannabis dispensary on a Tuesday afternoon.
I sat there for twenty minutes. I am not exaggerating.
I watched two people go in and come out. One was a man about Gerald's age in a Carhartt jacket. The other was a young woman in scrubs who looked like she was on a lunch break. Neither of them looked like they were doing something wrong. I got out of the car.
Here is the first thing nobody tells you: it looks like a doctor's office. I had built this place up in my mind as something from a movie my son Kevin watched in college — dark, loud, strange. It was none of those things. It had a front desk with a pleasant young woman behind it. It had four chairs with cloth upholstery. It had good lighting and no smell at all. The young woman asked for my card and my ID, and she did not raise an eyebrow or make a comment. She said, “Have a seat, someone will be right with you.” I have heard those exact words at my rheumatologist's office a hundred times.
The person who helped me was a young man, maybe thirty, with a name tag and a calm way of talking that reminded me of my daughter when she explains something medical to a patient's family. He asked what brought me in. I said arthritis and sleep. He nodded. He asked what I had tried. I said the list was long. He asked if I had ever used cannabis before. I said no, never, not once, and I could hear myself talking too much, explaining that I was a responsible person, that my daughter was a nurse, that I wouldn't be here if I weren't — and he said, “You don't need to explain. You have a card. You're here. That's enough.”
That sentence mattered more than he knew.
He showed me a small bottle of capsules. Low dose — 2.5 milligrams of THC, 5 milligrams of CBD. He said most people in my situation started exactly here. He said to take one at night, give it an hour, see what happened. He said I would not feel out of control. He said I could call if I had questions. The whole conversation was maybe twelve minutes.
I paid at the counter. It cost less than a decent pair of shoes. The young woman put the bottle in a small white bag, and I put the bag in my purse, and I walked out into the January cold and got into my Buick and drove home with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, which is how Gerald would know I was thinking, if Gerald had been there.
That night, after dishes, I took one capsule with a glass of water. I read my devotional. I turned off the lamp at nine. And I slept. Seven hours, straight, no waking at one with my knuckles throbbing, no staring at the dark ceiling doing arithmetic about how many hours I had left. I called Lisa at six in the morning and I could not stop crying, and she could not stop crying, and Gerald came downstairs and said, “What happened?” and I said, “I slept,” and he said, “Well. Good.”
Here is what I want you to know, if you are thinking about going: the building is not what you think. The people are not what you think. You will not become someone different when you walk through that door. You will be the same person you were in the parking lot — just a person who decided that hurting and not sleeping was not the only option left.
The parking lot is the hardest part. And even the parking lot is not that hard, once you get out of the car.
What is keeping you in yours?