Oh dear, almost out of Cheerwine

I'm down to three cans of Cheerwine.

For those who don't know, Cheerwine is a cherry-flavored cola made in North Carolina and not easy to find outside of a few Southern states. (It's kind of like a cherry Dr. Pepper.) Beverages & More in San Francisco was carrying Cheerwine in bottles--the holy grail--but seems to have lost interest. I haven't seen the soft drink there in months.

So on my last visit to Greensboro, N.C. (where I'm from), I shipped two six packs of Cheerwine cans back to my San Francisco address. I've consumed them sparingly, like bottles of water on the desert. And just as I had finished counting my last cans, I thought: Why don't I Google Cheerwine and see if there's a way to have some shipped to me?

Indeed there is. The Cheerwine site will sell me 24 Cheerwine Longneck Bottles for $22. I felt a song coming on--until I saw that the cheapest shipping option was $38.

Oh well. It seems to me the more unobtainable a comfort food/drink is, the more firmly rooted in your hometown it remains, the better it tastes. Case in point: Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

I used to roam the streets of Greensboro during visits home, hoping some Krispy Kreme employee would deign to flip on the 'hot light,' designating that they'd just cranked up the conveyer belt to produce dozens of delectable, warm, sugary circles. Once they started selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts in San Francisco grocery stores, I lost interest immediately.