Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

Perhaps, it is the older we get, the more it hurts. Or perhaps it is the more sentimental we get, the more it hurts.

Growing up, we rarely ate out. We were rural, country people, so my parents counted pennies to have enough for taxes, electricity and the few groceries we bought. Mainly, those were flour, cornmeal, Crisco, sugar, buttermilk and sweet milk, thus named by mountain people for the sweet taste of cream.

We raised our food. A garden provided over a hundred quarts of green beans, vegetable soup, tomato juice, “sour” kraut while corn was frozen. We raised beef, pork and chickens.

There was one chicken, who made her nest below the corner of the porch. Each morning, barefooted and clothed in play clothes, I gently opened the screen door to peep out to see if she was cuddled in her nest. Usually, she was but sometimes she had left behind eggs.

Mama, Daddy, Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Delbert made sausage every year with the best parts of the hog. They had a sausage grinder that turned out the meat onto a kitchen table, then they wrapped it in butcher paper. They divided a year’s worth between them, then sold the rest to yearly customers.

We rarely ate out. An occasional hamburger from the Dari Spot. When I became a teenager, the last of four because the others had moved out, we ate at the Sizzlin’ every Sunday after church.

But the fancy restaurant on the side of the main highway, I did not enter until I was out of college. It was built of sturdy wood and specialized in prime rib. A husband and wife built it from scratch and kept it running perfectly for 47 years. She oversaw the front, he watched the kitchen then took time to visit each table and ask, “How y’all doin’? Everything OK?”

The wait at the cozy place, with storied steaks and creamed spinach, was often 45 minutes to an hour. People didn’t mind. Most knew each other, as you do in a little town, so they sat on churchtype pews and talked.

We knew there would come a day when this handsome man and his beautiful wife would retire. They worked five days a week (closed on Sunday and Monday), always smiling and welcoming. It was whispered around town that the place was quietly on the market. No sign out front. Just circulated among realtors. After two or three years, it sold. To a foreigner from the other side of the Canadian border.

The first time we met him, he seemed quite nice and promised that nothing would change. “It works. Why I would change it?”

The first sign of trouble came when a woman, who was the one you needed to know to get a corner booth, picked up her pocket book and left one night. She had been there for 37 years. A month later, a server, who drove two hours round trip to work, left one night, leaving behind a paycheck. She had been there for 35 years. Her best friend in the restaurant was so concerned when she didn’t answer her phone after several days, that she called the authorities for a well care check. She answered the door and said, “Tell them I’m never comin’ back.”

The food began to slip noticeably, horribly. One night, I took a bite of the famed creamed spinach and struggled to swallow it, so terrible was it. The new owner was mystified.

It was our last time there. For months, we drove by and I said to Tink, “that place will be closed before long.”

It’s hanging on by a thread. The lack of business would have gotten them even if the health department hadn’t scored them 68 for rotted food and roaches.

The creamed spinach? It was being made with whipping cream three weeks past expiration.

Unbelievable. Forty-seven years of hard work destroyed in a short time.

Ronda Rich is the best-selling author of the Stella Bankwell mystery series. Visit www.rondarich.com to sign up for her free weekly newsletter.