Garden & Gun

My Old Kentucky Store

I worked my way through college in the mid-1980s at a wholesale grocery in my hometown of Danville, Kentucky. The brick warehouses dated to the 1880s. The wooden floors were buckled with age, and holes were patched with tin cans cut into pieces and nailed to the floor. Work at Central Wholesale Grocery began at 4:00 a.m., and we’d roll huge iron-wheeled railroad carts down in the house to get up a load. Then we’d push them to the dock and load eighteen-foot box trucks and send them into the countryside to stock the little stores that used to be in every rural community or wide spot in the road—outposts such as Penn’s Store, in Gravel Switch, Kentucky, which remarkably continues to be a resonant place in my life today.

In my classes I was combing through Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” or reading Flannery O’Connor. At Central I was getting a different

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