Before You Complain

Before you complain about the bill for your Thanksgiving groceries, or about how you had to fill the trunk of your car with bags of "fixin's" (as we say in the south), or about how long it took you to unload your car and get everything put away in kitchen cabinets, just check out the Holden Village preparations for the Thanksgiving feast.

The turkeys had already arrived. The produce and the perishables would arrive closer to the holiday itself. But the rest of the "fixin's" arrived Friday. And they arrived via a barge trip up Lake Chelan. The barge was met by two large trucks from Holden Village and the "fixin's" were offloaded onto the trucks by a team of indefatigable "mavericks" assisted by a crane to lift the flats onto the truck bed. The trucks then drove the 12 miles up the road to the village where they were met by every able bodied soul around to offload them at the loading dock and move the goods, one thing at a time, person-to-person along a human chain into the proper storage place.

It was daylight when the operation began. It was dark when it was finished.

And I have no idea as to what the bill might have been.

The first truck pulls up to the loading dock. (And yes, I forgot to add that we had just had a rather substantial snowfall the night before so these truck had to make the trip up on a snow-covered gravel road.)

The trucks were piled high with boxes and bags of food. Admittedly, most of this gigantic order will be used over the course of the coming months and not just for Thanksgiving, but it was a huge task to get it to Holden and offloaded into the proper storage areas.

Lead Cook, Mary Sather (in the yellow hat) was the person chiefly responsible for making the order and then for checking an itemized list to make sure that everything ordered was delivered. She is assisted in checking in the delivery by Carole Young.

The human chain responsible for unloading the truck stretched from the loading dock down the long hallway and past the 3 large lockers where food is stored. Dave Sather, Paul Haines, and Andrew Dutcher wait for the next item to come down the chain.

Just at dusk, the second truck arrives.

Sarah Gustner, Bill Somerville, and Dawn Coffey await the goods from the second truck.

Dave Mietzke takes a look at the back of the second truck. Those large bags were 50-pound bags of sugar and flour...heavy and unwieldy.

Hard work has its rewards at Holden. When all had been put into place and accounted for, everyone went in to the dining hall to enjoy a dinner of spanokopita...and ibuprofen.