It’s funny how certain foods are like portals to the past. As soon as you take a bite you are immediately back in an old memory. Ramen noodles do this for me. I don’t eat Ramen very much. I’m aware it’s not the healthiest option on the planet. But, occasionally, I will get Ramen for the kids (they rarely get it, and for some odd reason, have decided it’s a treat). I ate a packet for lunch today and as soon as I smelled the rich broth, I was floating back in time.

Fifth grade. Morehead, Kentucky. 

I think this was the first year our family stumbled on this amazing food. By this time my brother and I were latchkey kids. Our parents were working, and my mom was finishing up her last year of school to be a Physican’s Assistant. A save-a-lot had moved into town and my mom would stock up on freezer meals and fast foods that my brother and I could prepare for ourselves. 

Every day after school I would walk into the trailer, put the old copper kettle on. I’d pull out one of our orange bowls that had a white lining, bowls that had followed our family everywhere we lived,  and I would make myself a bowl of ramen noodles. 

I was always starving after school. Fifth grade was the year I stopped eating lunch at school. When we first moved to this school, I was in second grade and my brother was in fourth. My parents would send school lunch money with my brother and he would pay for both of us. We ate school lunches for about two years, but we didn’t really enjoy them. They served a lot of Southern American food that we just weren’t used to. Pinto beans and cornbread, corndogs (what was this thing?? I always pulled the corn breading off and ate the hotdog), really cheap hamburgers that had some kind of weird slime on them, mashed potatoes that were so runny it was almost more like a porridge. (There was one meal that I actually liked, beef vegetable soup and a bread roll.) 

When I was in fourth grade, we moved away for one year while my mom did an intensive year of study at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, then we moved back to Morehead. I was now alone at my school, my brother had moved on to middle school, and I had no idea how to navigate school lunches. Who did you pay? When did you pay? How much? It just seemed like an overwhelming problem, overwhelming because everyone else already knew what to do, and here I was, in 5th grade, clueless. 

Just an aside. This has long been a problem for me. My mother is British and grew up overseas, my father is American but he grew up overseas. I did not move back to the states till I was almost seven. And we moved to Eastern Kentucky that has its own unique culture going on. I spent a lot of my childhood not knowing what everyone else already knew. I would try to be very observant, see what everyone else was doing and copy them. Or just retreat. Or pretend like that was just not something I wanted to do, cause I had no idea how to go about doing it. Sometimes I would brave being made fun of and just ask, but other times, it seemed like too much energy to try and figure things out. And for school lunches, It was just easier to not buy any. 

So, I told my mom I would take a lunch. And then, I just didn’t. I didn’t like packing lunches. In fourth grade I got teased quite a bit because I would pack a lunch and bring food that was not “normal” like a whole tomato that I would eat like an apple, or a piece of bologna, and piece of bread, packed separately, cause that’s how I liked them. Somewhere along the way I just decided school lunches were not worth the hassle. So, I would sit at a table and wait a couple minutes until I could just line up with the other kids and wait to leave the cafeteria. I always had a book to read, so I wasn’t bored. 

Then I would get home, starving and eat Ramen noodles. And cereal. And whatever else was laying around the house. 

I’m not sure what kind of memory that is. But, I’m thankful for those hot hearty noodles that made me feel full and satisfied after a long day at school.