What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow.
I dream a highway back to you.

-Gillian Welch

What will sustain us through the summer?  Where will this year's lessons go?  We are a nation that enjoys a tremendous, bland convenience.  Give us the red, unbruised tomato, even if it tastes not unlike the packing material that cradled it along thousands of miles of highway from field to brightly lit display cooler.  Give us the new bestseller on our doorstep at forty percent savings, even if it means sticking it on a diesel-guzzling truck for three days.  Give us omelette on a stick.

Or...

Join me for breakfast at the Farmers Market, Saturday, July 19th.  We'll feature Cup of Excellence coffees from small family farms in Colombia and Costa Rica and Fair Trade Organic coffee from Bolivia.  Listen to live music and enjoy the wares of local artisans.  Dream a highway back to Blacksburg and then walk or pedal your way to a simpler life.  Sustainability begins right here, right now.

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Roasters Group rolls into Blacksburg town on Friday.  The weather greeting this circus befits a gathering of people who play with fire: lightning, heat and sun.  More heat when the grills are fired and the mustards are served at Kathi Z's flavor dynamics class.  Black lightning when the chocolate is sampled and espresso shots are pulled.  Poor Mountain is no longer burning but there will be smoke.  Roast smoke.  Pig smoke.  Tobacco smoke as only Joe Nazare can present it.  We'll cool things with a water quality class delivered by Skip Finley of Cirqua.  Need a break from the sensory overload?  Play with the roast analyzer on loan from Javalytics.

When we sat down to work on recipes for the beer banquet (Did I forget to tell you about that?) planned for Friday night, we quickly diverged into stories of previous MARRG meetings.  Stashed bottles of Port, oyster roasts until dawn, bonfires visible from space.  I asked The Rev to read the roster of the people heading our way.  Because of coffee, we have friends from Virginia's Eastern Shore, Clearwater, Zimbabwe, Matagalpa, New Orleans, Green-vul, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, St. Paul.  We wish we could devote more time to those friendships.  We neglect them.  But here they come, spending their own dough to get here.  For one weekend in the summer, for the third straight year, Blacksburg is the center of the Mid-Atlantic Coffee Universe.  And we are going to enjoy ourselves.

Xanga wants to know if I am keeping my site.  The one I paid for to have for life.  Just like an old car, it might not be pretty, but it's paid for.  So, yes.

Major updates coming soon.  Bookstore news, coffee roasting news, big changes around the Easy Chair, and the MARRG army is coming to the Burg.  Stay tuned.

I'm reading the opening pages of Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, by Chris Salewicz.  I really do not want to put this book down, but I am distracted by other books and writers.  I am thinking about my lost punk ethic, risk taking, and why I am afraid to piss people off who desperately need to be pissed off.

The other books and writers distracting me are:

The Place You Love is Gone, Melissa Holbrook Pierson
W.W. Norton

Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra
Mountian Trail Press

Pierson is not afraid to piss you off.  She is as punk as it gets.  She does not try to bring you about gently to the perils facing your favorite places.  Hers is the rough middle finger poking you in your glazed-over eye.  But she loves those places that are gone and writes of them:

"Five minutes from home and we're driving into the Cuyahoga Valley.  From here, I can see that I am driving back years and years, back into childhood, for all that I describe is gone now, or almost all.  At the cross of the railroad tracks there is a gas station and a few shops.  At another crossroads a half mile later, where one road arches back up the steep hill toward the town of Cuyahoga Falls, there is a a dark little roadhouse called the Lodge, which serves a couple different forms of beef.  Then the pavement goes along the banks, and winds under trees, or straightens out past the old farms.  One of them is where we pick our Halloween pumpkins, after sitting to be photographed on a small mountain of them in the back of a wagon.  The memory struggles under an equal heap of lacerating nostalgia.  We simply called this place "the valley," because we knew in some well-obscured part of us that the Cuyahoga was the origin of everything.  Not only was it primal in itself, a slow meandering of brown water through quiet brown woods, but we would not be here except for it.  We barely notice its existence."

Pierson could be describing the cider mills and sled hills of my own lacerated nostalgia.  The train trestles, declining pottery factories and collapsing water towers.  The backyard playfields and sandlots.  We all love some part of the place where we grew up, even if we fled as fast as we could.  We take with us the memories of favorite hangouts, nights out too late, friends who also moved on.

In Homecoming Journals, Krisha Chachra moves on, and comes home.  Very personal stories compiled from her work for the Roanoke Times describe the impact that small-town living and big city chaos have had on the author as a chronicler of the American experience.  She came back to Blacksburg, Virginia for the same reasons many of us choose to relocate here. She also pays tribute to her parents' immigrant experience:

"Thinking about it now, I can imagine naturalization is somewhat like being adopted - or maybe the word is accepted.  Life doesn't change, but all of a sudden you feel more like you have a place at the table, like you're standing inside the circle, playing on the team and feeling part of a family.  Suddenly everything you worked for, everything you left behind - including the relatives in your native country - everything you've sacrificed, has been worth it.  With a simple certificate you feel validated.  And you feel, as my parents told me, empowered to go forth without hesitation to meet the opportunity you traveled thousands of miles to sieze.  Really, it is a staggering experience."

Chachra's book comes to you through the DIY ethic of punk.  She wrote a tribute to Blacksburg, found a publisher and got it printed and distributed.   She reminds us what a wonderful town this is.  Before we are all sitting around over our beers talking about the gone, gone place we loved.

What we read speaks to who we are.  Today is the second day of summer so we are reading great page-turners and pulpy fiction like...Animal, Vegetable, Miracle?  Sure.  And Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.  And one lucky customer walked out with a hardcover copy of Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild for the price of a paperback.

Speaking of coffee, it seems like ages ago that the traveling circus of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Roasters Group was here.  I've been so overwhelmed with getting the bookstore open that I haven't had time to even recap the events of the MARRG weekend.  Hopefully Brian will cover that on the MARRG site.  I need to thank some people, though.  Especially our sponsors and instructors Terry Davis of Ambex Roasters, Jodi Foutch of Swiss Water and our own web guru, John DeMarce.  Thank you to all of the MARRG members who attended and made our third gathering a success, especially returning members.  If you thought about coming but opted out you missed our second annual focused beer tasting at Vintage Cellar here in Blacksburg and a tour of Virginia Tech's dairy complex.  The bonus event was a sampling of cigars presented by Joe Nazare of Blacksburg Tobacco.  And then there was the late-night-find-the-bottle-of-port challenge.