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.