Disposable Day Volume 5: From Farm to City, by Kate McDonagh

Kate has been one of my dearest friends since high school. She's been there with me through major life stuff, is one of the people who I usually talk to twice a week even though we are separated by 1000 miles or so, and after I got married I went to live & work with her and her brand new family on their blueberry farm (turns out being married to a foreign grad student means that either you spend your summers in poverty because one of you isn't allowed to work in the other person's country, or you spend the summers apart... as we were already very poor we chose the latter option... So here's my honorary sister, going through a major life transition, and making the best of it like how she always does (if you're interested in seeing pictures of Kate check out my ode to North Carolina, she's real pretty) -Lauren

For the last 3 years, my family was living on a 12 acre organic blueberry & produce farm about 30 miles  outside of Asheville, NC.  We ran it as a farm-to-table establishment with Tupelo Honey Café where my fiancé is the head chef.  Although the farm was incredibly special to us- it’s where we became a “family”- it became quite clear that the pros outweighed the cons of moving back into Asheville.

MY disposable day happened to fall 3 days before the official moving day.  It also happened to fall on the one day that 2 friends since high school came to visit!  So, here my life is literally dissolving around me as I take in all that has to be done in THREE DAYS and, oh! Great!  Friends in town!  It seemed like the prefect 24 hours to use for disposable day- plus, if I waited any longer, the little camera probably would have been lost forever!

So our day started on the farm.  You can see Marshall stirring 2 pots of milk gravy at once- one with sausage & one without.  My fiancé is the best guy in the world & made us 2 kinds of gravy the night before to have on our biscuits!  Whenever Marshall and I get together while he’s back in the states, we tend to spend it eating delicious food & drinking delicious beer! 

After having breakfast & feeding the chickens, we went to visit our next door neighbor’s horses & give them some hay (Top Picture). She has a huge old barn that now houses about 7 (two litters’ worth) of barn kittens, typically we have to stop and visit with them for awhile, too!  Marshall got a pretty big kick out of feeding the horses.

On this day, I put packing out of my mind & we headed into Asheville.  I wanted Doug and Marshall to see our NEW house & visit some of our old stomping grounds.

As far as Marshall & I are concerned, no trip to Asheville is worth taking without a visit to the “Brew and View” nobody calls it this anymore, but I’m kind of a nostalgic person. 

Little Jack usually likes it too, but instead of letting him run around in the game room, he was forced to stay outside (terrible parenting, I know).  You can see him crying as I momentarily slipped his leash around the chair for this shot.  For this he was rewarded with his first ever bowl of chocolate ice cream.

Next, we dropped by the new house so everyone could marvel at how HUGE it is (twice as big as our tiny house on the farm) and how close it is to town- I don’t drive, so to be walking distance from EVERYthing is quite an improvement to being 6 miles from ANYthing!  

There, we ran into Brian, my man-partner, who was unloading ANOTHER of many many car loads that he had driven into town on his way to work.  It was a good thing too, because I didn’t have a key yet!  That’s when he said he could meet us later & take Jack off our hands so we could go see a movie that was playing at the Brew and View.  So, a minute about this place.  When Marshall & I were roommates, we lived about .25 miles from this awesome old movie theater/ pizza place/ brewery.  They show oldish movies for $3, have amazing beer, great pizza AND a full menu.  We spent a LOT of time at this place.  Oh, did I mention the game room? Video games, pin ball, air hockey, everything!  And most of the time, more than half of them work!  So, I was pretty excited when Brian offered to take kiddo off my hands for the night!  A movie! Out!  Wooowww.

Now, the only thing that we hadn’t done or made plans for yet that would make this day absolutely perfect was to go to the record store! Off we headed to Harvest; it’s not the biggest record store, and probably not the best, but I’ve never been anywhere that reminded me quite so much of High Fidelity as this place.  I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re going for, but they’d never admit it.