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Photo by cmraseye
I don’t mean that it’s a faux wild west town, I mean that it’s still a small pioneer town, albeit completely modernized. The bank still has the 100-year-old glass and wood partitions with bars separating you from the teller, but tucked into the historical front is an ATM. Ranchers and farmers drive their big trucks down Main Street talking on their cellular phones and every night the sidewalks roll up except for the local bar–where the action is. If you left your car unlocked during harvest season you’d return to it to find it crammed full of zucchini and other fresh produce from someone’s garden. A bounty for us; not so much for others.
—ville was a town of 1,400 people, located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, nestled between the coast range and the Cascade mountains. It’s a town where you can be on a first-name basis with the postmistress; she actually sneaked me back into the off-limits mail sorting area (WITH THE REGISTERED MAIL!) to fix her crashed computer. We talked about everything I got or sent in the mail, including books, my copyediting business, and the latest book I read that she would like.
If you walked across the street, you were in the pharmacy, an old-fashioned (yet completely modern) store where I would stock up on the best paper stationery (and shampoo!). And then there was a law firm, a real state office, an Ace hardware downstairs in a two-story building that housed the Masonic order temple upstairs, an abandoned church that a guy filled full of junk, but hung Christmas lights from the steeple every holiday season, a weekly newspaper that has since died, and multiple smaller cafes and restaurants that are all long gone now.
The restaurant we frequented was the General Store, housed in, you guessed it, the old general store. The wooden floors creaked, the front double glass/wood doors barely shut all the way, and the small kitchen in the back had been added on by the owners in order to run the restaurant. But the General Store was my home during one long, hot summer. My sister had been a waitress there for years and had just taken over making the pies when she came home and mentioned they needed a “till girl.”
Of course, I asked what that was first and then went in for an interview. Within a week, my new name was “Tilly.” I rang up customers’ meal receipts, washed tables, seated customers, helped serve pie and soup and sandwiches and salad. The restaurant only served lunch, but they served it for a nice swath of the day (10-4), so there were always people straggling in to enjoy the fresh-baked wheat bread, homemade soup of the day, and the pie! The pie! This is when my family’s secret pie recipes came into play. In order to serve a variety, my sister used our family’s top secret chocolate cream pie recipe (who am I kidding? everyone knows our pie recipe!) and then learned to make the best strawberry rhubarb pie anyone had ever tasted. She’d make pies until she could barely walk to the car to collapse in the passenger seat. And everyone ate those pies until they rolled themselves out the front door.
A typical day would get rolling about 10, when Sara, our fellow waitress would turn on our “set background music,” an old tape of some folk singer warbling “Oh Danny Boy,” and I’d fill the ice box and Michelle would cut the pies into eight pieces with a special pie cutter. And then the doors would open and the folks would throng in for lunch.
My days blurred into frenzies of clearing tables, seating people, ringing up customers on the till and trying to figure out several who shall remain nameless and their confusing riddles (which I swear they saved up just for me) (Roger!). And we always hauled home the leftovers from the day, loaves of bread and pots of soup for our family. But there were also moments of reprieve, when we would all gather in the back kitchen with Rex, the owner, and his sister, Sheri, who made sandwiches faster than I’d ever seen in my life. It was always a joke fest. The waitresses would jockey for a place to sit down on the stairs (only for a 15-minute break) and I would be put to work washing dishes.
One day though, the place was packed. It was the Pioneer festival or something and we had the entire Pioneer court for lunch (after the Main Street parade). I was cutting pies as fast I could cut and another waitress was pulling each piece out on their own plates. The plates were hot from the dishwasher, the restaurant was boiling (tin roof) because it was August and 100 degrees, and suddenly it got really quiet: a lull in the conversations, the tape ended and Sara hadn’t turned it over yet, and a friend came in the front door.
“Your chickens are loose.”
Everyone turned to look. I about fainted right there on the floor. There was nothing I could do. I shrugged.
“Oh well.”
“And your dog is hunting them.”
And I looked at her. “Are you serious? I can’t leave.”
She told me specifics and I told her to just let it be. We couldn’t leave a restaurant full of people. Mosey was a sheep-herding dog. That’s what Australian shepherds are built for, herding things. He had probably chased them around so much they died of heat stroke. Other waitresses caught wind of our dilemma and laughed. Rex made a joke about hot chicken soup and we all burst out laughing. Something caught our funny bone (not the poor chickens, the situation), and we couldn’t stop. That summer we laughed more than we had in a long time.
It was a Good Thing.
