Cori Gail Harris wasn’t feeling great this past August when a man who reminded her of a character from “The Lord of the Rings” pushed his cart into her lane at the IGA supermarket.

Ms. Harris, 53, had been a cashier since July at the St. Stephen, S.C., store and was still getting used to the physical demands of the job. “I was standing on my feet for four-hour shifts, and my body could barely handle three hours,” she said. But the 6-foot-8 man with the long white beard stacking his groceries on the conveyor belt momentarily distracted her from her aches and pains. “I thought, wow, the Lord just sent me my own Gandalf, the White.”

That man, Edgar Lee Hayes, 78, was no wizard, though he acknowledged a magic wand might have come in handy at the time. He, too, had been feeling unwell. And in the 15 years since his wife had died of heart failure, his strategy for finding someone new to date — “I was waiting for God to drop somebody out of the sky,” he said — hadn’t been fruitful. In the space of a few scanned items, he developed a crush on the new cashier.

Ms. Harris is originally from Homer, Mich. She was divorced in 1992 after a brief marriage and has two daughters, ages 36 and 20. Her route to Bonneau Beach, S.C., where she and her younger daughter, Zoey, were living when she started working at IGA, involves a detour through Hazard, Ky. In 2013, she moved there and became financially dependent on a boyfriend. When they broke up in 2020, she returned to Michigan but was unable to find stable work and housing during the pandemic.

“My daughter and I and our two cats were seriously about to go to a homeless shelter,” she said. In December 2023, a friend she had never met in person but got to know through the online horse adventure game Star Stable offered to help. “I didn’t have a vehicle, and I didn’t have any money, but Diane said, ‘We’re coming to get you.’”

Ms. Harris’s speech in Georgia, a top battleground state where she has narrowly trailed in polls, signaled a more combative and nimble approach in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign. On Monday, ProPublica reported that the deaths of two women in the state were a result of delayed treatment after receiving medication abortions, episodes that occurred in the months after Georgia passed a 2022 law banning abortion at six weeks. Two days later, Ms. Harris’s campaign announced that she would travel to the state to highlight their stories.

Ms. Harris’s professional background is in data entry. She had hoped to find clerical work when she and Zoey moved their few possessions into the Bonneau Beach home of Diane and Fred Varvell a year ago. But after the couple returned home from a summer grocery shopping trip and told her IGA was hiring, she applied. Though the work was taxing on her body — she attributes her discomfort to scoliosis — it had its rewards.

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