Thar's Food in Them Thar Hills

The other night Hubby suggested that I might be giving people the wrong impression by calling this blog "A Hill-ish Life."

"You don't find life here hellish, do you?" he asked. I was pleased to note the worry in his voice, an acknowledgment, I believe, that I have made a supreme sacrifice in trading the beaches of sunny So Cal for hills and barbequed pig and, worst of all, winter.

"Of course not," I responded. I thought I'd better not say anything more enthusiastic just in case I might want to throw the I-made-the-supreme-sacrifice-of-moving-to-Asheville-for-you card in his face during a future domestic spat.

But the truth is (and I'm not afraid to commit it to writing because, in all honesty, we rarely have the kinds of domestic spats where we scream things like, "You made me move to this hellish place and I hate you for it!") there is nothing remotely hellish about my life here. Hill-ish, yes. You try pushing an 18-pound stroller with a 21-pound boy to your local Asheville coffee shop. For those whose geography is a little fuzzy, we live in the Blue Ridge Mountains. For those who haven't been to the Blue Ridge Mountains, they are mountains. 'Nuff said.

But hills aside (and they do have their advantages, especially on the two days a year I put a pair of shorts on this 41-year-old body) there are some things about Asheville that not only rock, but that you can't get in Los Angeles. Like Amazing Savings.

My sister-in-law, V., took me on my first foray to Amazing Savings. "I don't want you to get your hopes up," she said nervously on the way there. Apparently she thought someone who comes from the land of Whole Foods and Wild Oats (when there was a distinction) and, even more importantly, Trader Joe's (how I miss you, Trader Joe's) would be disappointed by a shabby old grocery store that sells discounted gourmet organic treats amidst a splendor of grime, dented cans, and fast approaching pull dates.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was well and truly primed for the Amazing Savings experience. I had been, you see, more than a little cowed by the local, premiere, more-expensive-than-Whole-Foods, all natural grocery store that everyone told me I was going to love. I made visiting it my first order of business on my first day in Asheville. (Okay, my first order of business after feeding The Boy, playing with The Boy, putting The Boy down for his morning nap, and feeding The Boy again.) Hubby was driving two bored and smelly hounds across the country, my brother- and sister-in-law were off doing whatever artists do at art shows, and I was aware from a sad wealth of experience moving to new cities about which I knew next to nothing that a salad bar, fresh sushi, and local organic everything would counter the lava pit of anxiety bubbling just below the surface of my Cool Mama facade.

The soothing interior of Greenlife presented me with a reassuring expanse of curried tofu salads and tahini-eggplant wraps flanked by the greens and reds and yellows of locally grown produce. Clad in my newly purchased 60's-ish shell, The Boy strapped to me in my hip-yet-attractive brown silk sling, I was sure I'd fit right in with Asheville's cool crowd.

As we squeezed our way toward the salad bar, however, I became uncomfortably aware that the lime green and brown design of my dress seemed to violate some tenet of the local dress code that mandated the wearing of nothing more colorful than a faded dark red roughly the color of mud. My hair hung lankly amongst the reaching dreadlocks surrounding us; my manicured toes in their beach-like flip flops withered in embarrassment as a parade of clunky shoes clumped past. Meanwhile, The Boy smiled hopefully at passersby from his perch in the cart and was perplexed when, instead of the usual adoration he garners from strangers, they passed him up for dirty children with long hair and obviously more environmentally concerned parents than his. Tears sprang to my eyes at the unfairness of a world where my child is likely to remain bald until his third or fourth birthday and, thus, unable to grow his hair to an androgynous length, ergo rendering him an outcast in the Asheville toddler community.

The final indignity occurred when the checker looked pointedly at the small pile of groceries that had accumulated on the belt. "Do you need a bag?" she asked, as if she were saying instead, "Have you moved here to pollute our increasingly over-developed mountain idyll, you cursed suburban outsider?"

"I just flew here with an eight-month-old, two suitcases, a stroller, and a really big, awkward car seat," I heard myself pleading. "I didn't have room to pack my canvas grocery bags." Instead, what came out of my mouth was a meek and quavery, "Yes." I managed to check the tears until we were safely in the car.

So imagine my happiness a couple weeks later when, nurtured by the comforting presence of V., I discovered Amazing Savings. The T.J. Maxx of groceries, if you will. Aisle after aisle of treasures that I recognized from the shelves of Whole Foods. Quarts of expeller pressed olive oil for $6.99. Pints of gourmet gelato for $1.49. Organic pink peppercorns and pristine jars of anchovies and the blue potato chips they serve on JetBlue flights. Amazing Savings was a carnival ride of gustatory glee, a carefree outing where I could fill the shelves of my walk-in-closet of a pantry for a mere $45, thumbing my nose at Greenlife all the while. I couldn't wait to return.

And so, last week, I left The Boy with his new sitter, turned up the volume on our soon-to-expire subscription to XM radio (a vestige of Hubby's cross-country hound transport), and set off for my mecca of bargain gourmet grocery shopping.

Amazing Savings, I understood, lies more than a few miles out of town, a fact one tends not to notice when in the welcome company of one's sister-in-law. Alone now, I reminded myself that I've yet to spend more than 20 minutes in the car going from anyplace to anyplace in the Asheville environs. I'm from L.A. What's 20 minutes on the highway?

Quite a lot when you've lived in Asheville for a month, apparently. What happened to the girl who thought nothing of driving 20 minutes to go to her preferred Trader Joe's rather than the one a mere 10 minutes away? What has become of the yoga devotee who, after moving from West Hollywood to Long Beach, still embarked on a once-a-week forty-five minute trek for a sweaty mysore practice with her favorite teacher? Suddenly 20 minutes seemed like an eternity and nothing could explain it but the change in altitude.

Maybe it's a simple matter of driving for 20 minutes through nothing but trees and other green things, as if traveling some great distance through hostile forests to reach the next fortressed castle. On L.A. freeways your best hope of spotting something green comes from the passing landscapers' truck; instead you spend your time watching a dizzying amount of traffic exit and enter the freeway as if to announce that you are passing someplace that others find important and useful. Outside the small footprint that marks the Asheville city limits, it seems, there is little that others -- and therefore I -- find similarly important.

Indeed, when I finally reached the Amazing Savings exit off the interstate, my stomach clenched with a vague fear that I was about to arrive, finally, in The South. With a small stirring of hope, I fell into a long line of cars backed up from the stop sign at the end of the exit. Surely all these people had important places to go -- pedestrian malls dotted with Pinkberry's and sleek yet inoffensive office buildings and Mini dealerships. In fact, it turned out, they were just waiting for a particularly cautious driver in a beat-up white pick-up truck to negotiate a left turn.

I glanced at the clock as I finally made it onto the Amazing Savings road. Twenty-five minutes since I had snuck out of my safe home while The Boy was occupied with the chewed dog bone he is not allowed to put in his mouth (really). A soft, gagging noise spit out of my throat as I imagined him turning around at the sound of the front door closing and erupting in a wail of abandonment that the sitter had been unsuccessfully trying to quell for the length of my journey. The urge to turn around right now was strong, but not quite as strong as my sense of wifely failure at discovering the night before that we had run out of olive oil, anything that grows, and, most egregiously, the corn chips eaten in a hurry at the tail end of The Boy's naps that have become a staple of my diet.

With a jerk of self-approbation and downright terror, I pulled my mind away from my kitchen deficiencies and back to the road. Had I seen that tractor-parts store before? Was the "Do Drop Inn" on the way to Amazing Savings and wouldn't I have stopped to explain to them that they were missing the pun if I had passed it before? I was all alone in the North Carolina countryside in my shiny 2007 CRV and the banjo music from Deliverance was playing in my head even though I've never actually seen the movie. But I hear it's scary.

And then, like a cheap yet effective bevy of angels, it appeared -- the Amazing Savings sign. My elbows puddling in sheer gratitude, I pulled in to the parking lot and ran for the door on shaky legs. I was greeted by the somnolent buzz of bad florescent lighting and the abandoned-looking corner where little progress had been made since my last visit on construction of what appears to be a future, incongruous coffee bar.

As I headed right to begin my aisle-by-aisle foray, I recalled V. warning me off the fruits and vegetables that sat, sad and slightly wrinkled, at one end of the store. They were flanked
by shelves crammed with salad dressings that would have charmed and thrilled me -- Annie's Goddess (only one bottle, but lots of Annie's Thousand Island if that's your thing) and Newman's Own and some I didn't recognize but that had the word "organic" on the label, which is a sure way to get me to buy them. Only V. had warned me off the salad dressing here too with a slightly nauseating story of some she had purchased that had gone bad on the shelf. It had seemed such an insignificant detail at the time. Now it taunted me and my eagerness to come to this shabby poor substitute for my beloved Trader Joe's. How to explain to my friends and family that we are spending more on groceries in Asheville than we did when we lived in glossy West Hollywood?

It got worse before it got better. Sure, there were Terra Chips, three bags for two dollars, but none of the corn chips were made from organic corn, which is the only way I can justify living off of them. I spotted pork-flavored Stove Top stuffing and something called "infusion marinade" that came with a plastic syringe. Next up, chitlins and pigs' feet and boiled peanuts.

But the treasures came, each one just as I reached a crescendo of panic when I realized that The Boy wasn't in my cart but was twenty-five miles away from my needy arms. Organic pumpkin oil and box after box of whole wheat penne and one single pint of Ciao Bella hazelnut gelato. (Actually that turned out to be kind of grainy, like it had melted and then been refrozen, but by the time I discovered this flaw I was home and pleased with my success and didn't care. It's still sitting in the freezer because sometimes I or Hubby have been known to be desperate enough for something sweet late at night to overlook a little grainy-ness.)

I felt immensely proud of myself carting my boxes of booty home. When I unloaded them I would yet again thrill to the pleasure of having plenty of space for everything I had bought and think back to our days of renting attractive yet cramped little duplexes, where space constraints sparked such creativity as storing baby formula in the linen closet and dog food on the washing machine. So I trilled to a friend on my cell phone as I sped past the turn-off to downtown. Oops.

But here's the thing that made the whole day a true triumph of belonging in Asheville, even without clunky shoes (okay, only those three pairs I bought Labor Day weekend) and a dirty child. I simply took a different exit and I drove straight to my home with nary a moment of panic. Maybe I was the only one exiting the interstate at that moment, but that didn't mean there was nothing of importance there. I ended up someplace, and that someplace stretched all the way to Austin Avenue and an arts and crafts house with a big front porch and a smiling boy playing in the living room.

My route home even took my past Greenlife where, I am proud to say, The Boy and I sometimes go to pick up some treats for a Friday night dinner. And we fit right in.

Audrey Catches a Chicken

When you live in California, there are many things that run through your mind when your new neighbor tells you your dog "got a chicken." Usually it is something like, "Can Audrey really steal those chicken breasts I was defrosting out of the sink?" or, "I've really been meaning to wash that dirty stuffed chicken toy."

But when you have just moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and when the people who come to build you a fence or put on storm windows say things like, "Ah'll bit that hawand o' yers cewd ketch hersef sem chickens," and when your neighbor, R., is standing on your front porch, breathless and slightly wild-eyed, it occurs to you that maybe the chicken in Audrey's mouth is alive.

Or, worse, isn't.

Before I could figure out how one should respond when one's new neighbor of barely two weeks informs one that one's dog has dispatched a neighbor's chicken, R.'s partner, M., dashed up the walk. She leaned forward, hands on knees, like a runner recovering from a particularly spirited 10K. R. and I waited wordlessly to hear the chicken's fate while Audrey slunk guiltily past me and inside the front door, where she plopped down with the heavy regret of someone who has done something she knows is terribly wrong but would do again in heartbeat.

"I yelled at her to drop it, and she did," M. panted approvingly. M. is a lover of dogs and perhaps more forgiving than the chicken's owner might be.

"I was just really worried for her," R. explained, unaccountably more concerned for Audrey than for the chicken. This was good news. Perhaps dogs ate live chickens as a regular matter in Asheville. Perhaps my block was home to a roaming flock of feral chickens and Audrey had done everyone a favor. Maybe they would ask me to have her do regular chicken patrol. "I was driving home and she ran right in front of my car."

"I was working out front, and R. got out of the car going, 'Dog. Chicken." M. smiled, and I felt grateful and helpless. "I knew right away she was talking about Audrey. I saw her wandering around about half an hour ago, but I figured you were close by somewhere. I guess she got into S.J.'s yard."

My brief moment of relief evaporated. This was no roaming feral chicken, but the pet of a soft-spoken neighbor who had stopped by to introduce herself just a few days before.

Worse, for the past half hour, as Audrey stalked her prey, I had been inside playing with The Boy, coaxing him into a nap, blending sweet potatoes for him, all in blissful ignorance of the fact that I had locked the dogs outside without blocking the stairs from the deck to the as-yet-unfenced yard with the disassembled Weber kettle and dented metal trashcan that were supposed to prevent things like Audrey getting out and eating a neighborhood chicken.

"You know," M. continued, as I continued to stare helplessly, rooted to my beautiful new porch as my beautiful eight-month-old baby snoozed upstairs in his very own room. "I'd better go see if the chicken is still alive."

She set off with the confidence and purpose I sorely lacked, having been raised in Los Angeles where most people are unfamiliar with the etiquette that accompanies your dog catching someone else's chicken.

R. turned to me, her skin a shade paler than usual, her eyes bluer and wide with fear. "I just know she's going to wring its neck," she informed me. "She's a country girl."

I hasten to draw attention to this designation. All evidence to the contrary, we do not live in the country. We have moved to a city, where one does not expect to find chickens roaming the streets and only country girls are equipped to deal with the fallout when they do.

"I don't know what to do," I finally admitted, as if stating this obvious fact would prove a corrective.

It didn't. But that was okay because M. reappeared, gently cradling the chicken, now wrapped in her tee-shirt and looking around with a vigor that would suggest she was, at least, not at death's door. The bird was actually quite pretty, with fluffy gold feathers that I could too easily picture against the soft chocolate brown of Audrey's muzzle.

"I don't think S.J.'s home," R. informed me. I wish I could say that at this point I sprang into action, but the truth is I was even more woefully unprepared to deal with this situation than I would have guessed. "Maybe we should call a vet."

Relieved, I watched her pull out her cell phone. Paying for a vet's bill I could do. We had, after all, just paid nearly double what we were quoted to have our furniture delivered (a story for another, less amused, posting). How bad could a veterinary bill be?

Quite bad, according to R., when she told me our only option was the emergency vet that charges $200 when you walk in the door. Asheville, it turns out, is home to two chicken doctors, but neither of them works on Wednesdays.

"I really think she's okay," M. said. The chicken was looking around with a fairly calm expression. On the other hand, I'm not really sure what expression a panicked chicken would wear. I'm not even sure chickens have expressions. "Do you have any moving boxes? We could put her in one and leave her by S.J's front door."

Moving boxes I had. With the glee of a useless person who finally has a job to do, I rushed into the room that will one day be Hubby's office (Hubby's office! My office! We have a real house with lots of rooms!), dumped some books out of a box, and lined it with an old pink towel. Ironically, we bought that towel at the Target in Lancaster, half an hour before we bought Audrey. She slept on it during her housebreaking period when we relegated her to the kitchen during the night. Perhaps she was now wreaking her revenge.

Back on the front porch, I proffered the box and watched as M. lowered the chicken into it. "I'll bring her over to S.J.'s," R. volunteered.

One may note that I had not, at this point, touched the chicken or anything touching it. It's not that I'm afraid of chickens. I'm just not used to seeing them on my front porch. Not that I've ever had a front porch before. Still, even when imagining the front porch I would one day have, my fantasies involved rocking chairs and porch swings and a hound or two, not chickens. Hubby, who has longed for a front porch far longer than I, no doubt concurs that one does not expect an injured chicken in a box to be part of the picture.

"I'm going to write S.J. a note," I declared. Here is something I know how to do. I know how to take responsibility for property damage and how to commit one's responsibility and remorse to writing. I know this not only from three years of otherwise shockingly pointless training at Columbia Law School, but as a human being who was truly, truly sorry that my dog had, at the very least, traumatized S.J.'s chicken.

As I scrawled words of apology and promises to pay for vet bills or, if need be, a new chicken, I saw that S.J. had joined R. across the street. Fine. Good. I deserved to fess up to the sins of my hound in person. I was prepared to be contrite.

I crossed the street waving the note and yelling that I was sorry, so sorry. S.J. stroked the chicken as she sized me up. "It's okay," she said quietly. "It's what dogs do. If these chickens were fatter they couldn't of got through the fence."

So at least Audrey hadn't gone hunting in S.J.'s fenced yard. At least the chickens were hanging out in front of the house, casting the scent of dinner and a few stray feathers into the breeze. A bloodhound could hardly be expected to ignore that.

"I'm not supposed to have them anyway," S.J. confessed. I am pausing here to consider highlighting that sentence. People who live in the city limits of Asheville are not supposed to have chickens. This fact seems to be of immense importance to every member of my family to whom I have related this story.

Just as I was feeling better, S.J. added, "I wonder what scared them out of the yard." I couldn't read her look. It was no secret that the logical cause of the scare would be Audrey. But that possibility somehow rendered her more guilty and me a worse neighbor for letting my preoccupation with my baby create this mess. (Said baby, by the way, was now awake and perched on my hip taking in the commotion with great interest. In case you think I'm an even worse mother than I am a neighbor and would leave my sleeping baby alone as I wandered across the street to offer mea culpas to my illicit-chicken-raising neighbor.)

"Please let me know if I can pay for vet bills or anything," I repeated, since there was really nothing else I could say. Somehow I suspected she would not take me up on my offer, which left me feeling worse, as if making the payment could wipe out my error, a Catholic confession for Jewish owners of chicken-hunting dogs.

"I'll just see if she's okay in the morning," S.J. said matter-of-factly. "If she's not, I'll fry her up."

This plain lack of sentiment lifted the slick wash of nausea I had been experiencing for the past hour and allowed me to even look forward to telling Hubby about the excitement when he got home from work.

He leaned back in one of our porch chairs, drink in one hand, The Boy in the other, and on his face I read extreme pride that he found himself a homeowner in this neighborhood of hounds and chickens and homes with front porches where you can sit with a drink after work.

From next door, M. waved. "Thanks for helping with the chicken!" Hubby greeted her.

"Oh, you didn't hear the best part," M. informed us. "I went into S.J.'s yard with her so she could show me how to put the chickens back in the coop if they ever get out again, and there was a rat in the coop."

"Ergh!" Hubby and I both exclaimed like the city folk we are.

"It was trying to get out, but its hind legs were caught and it was scrambling and going 'eeeech, eeeech!'" M. gave us an impressive imitation of a rat with its hind legs caught in chicken wire.

Hubby and I leaned over the porch, a rapt and slightly disgusted audience.

M. smiled and reeled us in. "I was like, 'oh,'" -- expression of similar disgust -- " and S.J. just said, 'Well we can't have that,' and picked up a two-by-four and just brained it."

"Aaaah," Hubby and I gasped in collective delight at the beauty of this horrible image. M. showed us how she had hidden her face as S.J. gave the rat its send-off, proving that she is not much of a country girl after all and probably wouldn't have wrung that chicken's neck had the situation warranted it. S.J., on the other hand, surely wasn't kidding when she said she would fry up the chicken if she didn't recover.

I ran into S.J. the other day, both of us taking a walk at the far end of the block. A middle-aged couple from New York, a thin young mother from Nantucket, at least one artist, and an Audi TT separated us from the chicken coop.

"How's the chicken?" I asked, expecting to hear either of a full recovery or a mighty tasty meal.

"Not so good," S.J. said with more honesty than I would have liked. "She can't stand up."

"I'm so sorry," I breathed in disappointment and genuine sadness. I could have made the vet bill offer again, but apparently people who own chickens understand that there is some fundamental difference between them and the kinds of pets you would take to a vet. Which perhaps explains why chicken doctors in Asheville have Wednesdays off.

"I'm not supposed to have them," S.J. sighed. Which, I guess, is the moral of the story. And an apt summary of what it is like to live on our block, where you can just see Asheville turning into a place where a family from Long Beach can fit right in.