A Free Ice Cream Kind of Day

 Well. Yesterday the ALI Team (want to join us? we have work for you!) got to tour what used to be a medical laundry facility, but what will be soon, once we've signed a few papers, the NEW WORLD HEADQUARTERS OF APPALACHIAN LITERACY INITIATIVE. It's so amazing I can't even think about it in less than ALL CAPS. 

Bristol Faith in Action has been astonishingly generous, giving us space for the last 3 years, but last year we just barely squeezed into it, and BFIA didn't have more to give. I will be thankful to them forever, and it was time for us to go.

The Team had a list of hopes for a new space: bigger, preferably big enough we could stay there for a good long while; free (oh we desperately hoped for free!); was climate-controlled (books need this, to say nothing of our Board and volunteers); had a functioning toilet; had WIFI or could have it added. Then we had a list of wouldn't-it-be-wonderful but not required, like a room or two separated off from the rest, and being within pleasant driving distance for most of us. In our pipe dreams we wanted a loading dock where it would be simple to unload pallets of books from the trucks delivering them (40,000 books is a lot to load and unload), and if we could have everything we wanted we'd prefer the space be in Tennessee.

Bristol is a border city, smack dab on top of the Tennessee/Virginia state line, which in our downtown actually forms the main street. This creates all sorts of unusual situations--right now, for example, the Tennessee grocery stores are on a sales tax holiday while the Virginia stores that are part of the same chain are not. ALI is based in Tennessee, it's where our legal address (a PO Box) and our registration are, but BFIA, where we had books delivered, is in Virginia. In Tennessee, to get a sales tax exemption certificate, which we are required by law to give to all the people we buy books from so we can get them tax-free, you type your Federal Nonprofit ID number into a database, and you get a certificate good for five years. It may have cost $20 originally, I can't remember, but I know that when it ran out a few weeks ago another appeared like magic in my PO Box, good for another five years.

In Virginia, to get the same certificate, I first had to register for some sort of state tax number, and getting it took a few weeks. Then, using that number, I filled out an 8-page application, and paid an annual fee of $300, for a certificate that only lasted 12 months. It's just about to expire and now I won't need to renew it.

Anyway, the former medical laundry is just so staggeringly beautiful it's hard to imagine it can be ours. It's a bit of a mess right now, of course--it's being used to store furniture for Ballad Health, and it's kind of beat up, and it's so fantastic. It has a loading dock. I pulled up to it this morning with my truck full of CVS shelving pieces, and two very kind men unloaded 90% of it in the time it took me and two other Team members to do the other 10%. Yesterday we all stood in the space, looking around, no one talking, and then I saw the expression on my Partner-In-Crime's face, and then our Operating Manager started talking about where her desk should go, and darned if Ballad didn't offer to take some of the cubicle pieces being stored in the space and build her a perfect desk. 

And then they pointed to a bunch of empty bookshelves in one corner of the room, and told us they'd been gathering up unneeded bookshelves from all over the hospital system, and those were all for us. Honestly I've never cried over dusty bookshelves before. (Well, wait, I probably have.)

Ballad Health is behind ALI in a big way, for a simple reason: increasing literacy in children leads to adults with better health. It's stunning, but it's true, and Ballad knows it, and they're on our side.

Which, this morning, felt pretty amazing. Then I went to the post office and one of our grants renewed for next year, and someone sent us a lovely private donation--I'm busy securing all the funds I can right now, we had 66 schools apply so far this year. We accepted 53 schools last year, which was a ton, but I hate the thought of telling 13 schools no. So that was wonderful. Then I went to our local bakery downtown. We're having guests for supper and the bakery's desserts are better than mine. I went to pay for my selection, and the woman behind the counter said, "Would you like a free ice cream cone?"

I said, "Is it free ice cream cone day?"

She said it was. I picked strawberry. It was delicious. It's that kind of a day.