Reinvestment and Recovery

Every once in a while I find myself needing some time off. I suppose that’s why we’ve structured “weekends,” into the minutes, hours and days that compose each year of our lives. This week at work was exhausting, yet simultaneously rewarding. As I’ve been slowly but surely settling into my role at the Learning Center, I’ve also been slowly, but surely defining it. I am the first of my kind at the Morgan County Learning Center, which means I’ve been writing the story, script and manual of exactly what an AmeriCorps College Access Guide should be achieving there. This hasn’t gone without great direction and persistent suggestion from my supervisor, but for the most part, I’ve been volunteering the forty hours a week, of which as a functioning adult member of society I am expected to perform work for wages, flying by the seat of my pants and crafting the part which I’d like to play for the residents of Morgan County. This week, the pants came off. I am done crafting a well polished job description, and have accepted my role as jack of all trades. I am here to ensure the success of the Learning Center. I am here to ensure my own growth and development as an individual. I am here to ensure the success of Americans, the working poor, the middle class, the wealthy and all those who fall invisibly outside of those distinctions. I am here to help and be helped. That describes my job to a tee.

The need for help in Morgan County, and Appalachian Ohio is overwhelming. It often seems like the grubby fingers of the consistently overlooked and exploited will clamor at anyone and anything that pays attention. Yet clamoring doesn’t always yield a surmounted obstacle, but could and often does end in struggle with no gain and no energy left. The Edward M. Kennedy Community Service Act allowed me to come here, under one condition: America will pay my living expenses, if I expend my time and energy for others to live. Although working to make higher education more accessible doesn’t yield a high “life and death,” daily scenario, I do know that what I do here can mean the difference between barely getting by and living happily for students who find themselves enlightened and therefore pursuing happiness. I’ve been working harder as I’ve become more comfortable in my job. I put in extra effort, knowing full well that many before me have also put in extra effort and as it goes with clamoring, Appalachian Ohio always ends face down in the mud. I can’t change the tidal ebb and flow that keeps these hills and valleys tied to the gravitational force that is abject poverty. I can, however, be wise with the time I’ve been given here and smart with every choice I make in order to provide the most energy for our collective clamor to the top. Friday was pay day. What did I do with my biweekly living stipend this week? I took off exploring the region that has graciously hosted me for the past three months, and reinvested my paycheck in the delights of South Eastern Ohio’s local luxuries.

I took Saturday for myself, needing not only a short break from work, but also a break from my life. I needed to be nourished, replenished and re-inspired and sometimes my soul needs to work on that alone. After a chilly morning run, seeing the fuchsia sun smearing color across the blue eastern sky, I showered and dressed well, just for myself. Trusty cooler in hand and favorite Buddha tote over my shoulder, I got in the car and headed for the first place that comes to mind when I require an unique remedy for soul nourishing—The Village Bakery & Café in Athens. It was just the place to kick start this day of reinvestment and personal recovery. At a small, round café table I found myself seated in one of two charmingly mismatched chairs with a cup of steaming coffee and a tenderly moist pumpkin-apple muffin pulled halfway apart exposing its delicate crumb on a small plate in front of me. It was cozily warm, as the wall that was becoming fast friends with my left arm was abutted by ovens on its opposite side. The interior of the bakery is painted butter yellow, and the available surfaces are all campaigning for you to eat well, with posters, murals and memorabilia donning words like “Slow Food,” and “Locavore.” There at my table, taking up my small nook on the market side of the small agri-bistro, I paged through a cookbook I’d brought and sipped my coffee to the serenading cinematic like sound of Billie Holiday. Moments like this, however, do not only exist for mere seconds in the mind of a film director. They can be found and had, with an understanding of simplicity and a keen sense of satisfaction.

After leaving the bakery blissfully content, I assumingly headed to the arms of another love, which brings great passion to my heart on Saturday mornings—the Athens Farmer’s Market. My Chuck Taylor clad feet must have tread the same path at least four times, canvassing the “T” shaped market for inspirational produce, of which it is never lacking. The red lining of my Buddha bag soon found itself in close quarters with orange, purple and yellow carrots, burgundy red leaf lettuce, the clammy dampness of a freshly pulled sweet potato, a dozen baby bell peppers ranging from yellow to green to aubergine, and crunchy, exotic Asian pears. I picked up two slices of Crumbs Bakery’s famous market pizza to deliver a slice to my neighbor who is newly in love with said pizza, and one for myself for Sunday lunch. A pinched bundle of purple sage caught my eye, a basket of dusty fresh Yukon Gold potatoes, and a half dozen cooking onions would all marry happily together in the French Lentil soup inspired by the initial color wheel of carrots. Finally, a chocolate, cherry, chocolate-chip cookie from Crumbs would serve as my late afternoon dessert on a sleepy, warm drive home.
Crumbs Bakery's amazing pizza.

Two more stops in Athens followed. The Farmacy, located conveniently in town and stocking all things local, organic, natural and good-for-you, is where I regularly buy Aladdin’s multi-grain flatbreads, made in Cleveland, Ohio and irregularly decided to pick up a bunch of organic bananas, as I’ve never eaten them before. A short drive down State Routes 50/32 to just within the limits of Albany, Ohio there stands the Athens Bulk Food Depot. The cookbook I was paging through, jotting a shopping list as my moistened fingertip flicked page after page, is a book about baking whole grain bread. My latest ambition is to perfect two things: a perfect whole-grain loaf of bread, and a whole-wheat muffin base, from which many more delicious muffins may evolve. I took a basket, which by the end of my perusal through the narrow, fully stocked aisles was, as expected, full and dislocating my shoulder. I picked up a ten pound bag of King Arthur Artisan bread flour, which I could’ve bought at Kroger, but by buying it at the Athens Bulk Food Depot, the graciously friendly owner and his wife got to keep more of my money. In addition to the infant sized bag of flour, I invested in a few new discoveries from the chapters of my bread book: toasted wheat germ, buckwheat groats, and non-fat dry milk. Upon checking out, the owner of whom I spoke so fondly, had a momentary crisis with the cash register and apologized profusely for keeping me waiting, to which I replied, “Please, take your time, I’m not in a hurry.” He smiled, let out a relieving scoff and said, “Well, you’re unusual then.” I thought about that the rest of the day.

Not finding myself tied to a day planner, in constraint with time, or a slave to a schedule, I was able to find the kind of joy that some people believe only exists in Christmas songs and on television, in stories and other fictional makings. I had nowhere to be and no certain time to be there, wherever it was I was going. I had the time and the desire to take moments for what they were, enjoy nothing but the happenstance of my surroundings, and take my time. After leaving the Bulk Food Depot, I took the long way around, going out of my way for a beautiful drive from Athens to Middleport, Ohio down State Route 681. My partner and I used to take Saturday drives on this road, for its beauty and its isolation. Like in Morgan County, the homes of Meigs County are privy to the space between. Even homes that are not great expanses of farm land sit on property that stretches for acres and acres. We’d always pass one farm, an Amish farm, where a hand painted wooden sign would warn speedy travelers of cinnamon buns, homemade bread, and whoopie pies at a roadside stand within the next mile. We always stopped and bought something, not because the baked goods were particularly delicious or that we had some ulterior motive behind investing four or five dollars in the handicrafts of Amish women. We stopped because we had four or five extra dollars, and because of the rural space between, we couldn’t imagine this small family saw much business in their curbside confections. There was always some sort of nostalgia involved in stopping for Amish baked goods, in buying something made from scratch, by hand, and not wrapped in an industrially manufactured plastic bag containing a company logo and an ingredient list a mile long. I passed that farm on Saturday for the first time in probably three years. There was a homemade wooden sign with hand painted letters, but now it read “82 Acres for Sale,” and the farm house and roadside stand were abandoned and already being reclaimed, along with the rough, hilly fields by the weeds. While we’d all like to blame the government, or the banks, or the head-honcho types we imagine to exist in the world that looms above our heads and out of our reach, I think each of us can bear some of the burden of blame for our economic troubles. We don’t buy our bread from roadside stands any more. We buy it in those corporate plastic bags, with a corporate list of ingredients, from a corporation like Wal-Mart where eight people are making a million dollars a minute thanks to shoppers like us. You can’t point your finger at Wall Street CEOs like Michael Duke (Wal-Mart) when your other hand is pushing a cart in his store.

My intentions for taking State Route 681 to State Route 33 through Pomeroy to Middleport were imbedded in the little rumbling in my stomach, the CD mix of Appalachian music fiddling through my speakers and my desire for feeding my soul—or rather, soul food. I decided after the market that I’d have a meal at a restaurant I used to frequent often when I lived in Athens full time. Millie’s is a comfort-food haven, nestled along a country road, off the heavily beaten path of State Route 7. It’s a seat yourself kind of a place, where they’ll bring you a menu, but most people order from the eight or nine offerings written on a white board you can barely read from your table. One of those offerings comes with two sides for $7.95. When I started going there, the price was $6.95. Only a dollar’s worth of inflation through America’s Great Recession isn’t too bad. I sat myself in the farthest booth, this time carrying my book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Shortly after getting my coat off and bedding into the bench seat, a smiling waitress brought me a menu and a tightly wrapped bundle of silverware in a starchy paper napkin. She immediately asked what I was reading, and through friendly conversation and an
explanation of the basic premise of the autobiographical story, she added that Millie’s gets as much food as they can from a local market, and often their eggs still have feathers on them when they go to crack them into your omelet—my kind of joint. My meal at Millie’s was a treat. Crispy skinned rotisserie chicken, tangy and salty collards cooked to mush with bits of smoky bacon, and a bowl of sweet, creamy macaroni salad comprised an eating experience I haven’t been able to enjoy for awhile.

Recently, upon returning to restaurants and dining establishments I used to thoroughly enjoy, I’ve been experiencing a sort of lack-luster disappointment as I dug into the foods I used to love to eat. My sausage sandwich at the Bob Evans Farm Festival left an unpleasant aftertaste in my mouth. The smoked, pulled beef brisket from Millstone BBQ didn’t please my palette the way it once did, and a crock of Chicken ‘n Noodles from Bob Evans was utterly offsetting. After eating whole, natural, local foods almost exclusively for certainly the past three months and even longer to a lesser extent, these foods didn’t taste good to me anymore. I could taste the preservatives. I could taste the mechanized process by which they were made. It didn’t taste good. My meal at Millie’s tasted good. As I pulled off bits and pieces of juicy, silken white meat from my chicken breast, I could hear women in the kitchen yelling orders back and forth. This little country diner serves up Appalachian Ohio soul food, situated just close enough to West Virginia to serve Southern favorites like collard greens and soup beans, yet Ohio enough for spaghetti and meat balls, and lasagna. They also make homemade pies, crust and all, with fresh ingredients. The apple has always been my favorite, and for the first time in my entire acquaintance with Millie’s, I passed on the pie for the cookie waiting patiently in my car. And while a Bob Evans situated on a busy street corner in a suburb, adjacent to a medical office, a drug store and two other corporate chain restaurants can claim to be “down on the farm,” Millie’s is just down the road, there are still feathers on their eggs, and Millie and her staff, and the local farmers who supply her restaurant got to keep a good percentage of the $8.12 I spent there on Saturday.

I drove home, back through Athens, stopping to pick up my Snowville Creamery milk and half & half and another cup of coffee at the Village Bakery, before heading back through the hills to Morgan County and my little McConnelsville home. The drive was lazy, sleepy and warm as anticipated, and I sipped my coffee and took small, gingerly bites of my chocolate, cherry, chocolate-chip cookie I’d been dreaming of all day long, so as to make it last longer. Crumbs Bakery has their non-dairy, no-egg chocolaty confection crafted to perfection. The center is chewy, the edges are crisp, and dried tart cherries, just barely plumped from the surrounding cookie dough, serve as delightful surprises throughout. The cookie made it twenty minutes, interchanged with sips of steaming pungent fair trade coffee. I made it another twenty minutes to my front door, where I was wearing the satisfaction of my day across my face in the form of a contented smile. It is safe to say that I am ready for another week at work, another day of paperwork and meetings, of filing reports and serving students. The weekend served not only as a recovery of my own sanity, my own spirit, but also a reminder that the work I do and the money I spend are America’s Reinvestment and Recovery Act. I try to eat locally, spend locally and serve locally. Thus far in my life, nothing else has so eased my conscience and brought me so much joy. Remember, take time to enjoy your life, to know yourself, and always buy, shop, and eat local.