‘A ray of light.’ The Isom IGA rises from toxic mud to new life. | Opinion

The first thing you notice is the light. Bright, cheerful light beams from the ceiling and through display cases to illuminate apples and potatoes and Easter baskets.

Then the smells. Pizza dough, coffee, glass cleaner, fresh air.

Then the movement, everywhere, people polishing, stacking, sweeping. Smiling. Everyone is smiling.

Dale Blair carefully lines up boxes of plastic wrap and aluminum foil onto a shelf. The last time we saw him, booted and masked, he was wheeling a grocery cart full of cans of vegetables out to be dumped into a huge mass of spoiled food. Then he’d trudge back into the darkened store emanating the unbelievable stench of mud, sewer water, and meat and milk just starting to rot.

“I’m tickled we’re back,” Blair said. “I wasn’t sure we would be.”

No one was. After the July floods sent six feet of water and mud coursing through this tiny community’s beloved IGA, it seemed like an insurmountable task to reopen. Owner Gwen Christon called it the lowest point of her life.

But on Saturday, the IGA will open its doors to customers, and next Wednesday, they will officially open with a ribbon cutting ceremony in what many call a miracle. Christon thinks that too, but she also wants it to buoy a tired region that is still struggling to rebuild.

“I hope it’s an encouragement to people,” Christon said. “I want people to know it was hard and discouraging, we got depressed. But things do get better day by day. We heal. If we continue to work hard and be patient we can come back on top.”

Before and after photos: Renovated Eastern Kentucky grocery store reopens after floods

Divine intervention?

The series of events that brought the Christons — Gwen, her husband Arthur and son Simon — and their 25 employees to this day have been nothing less than extraordinary.

A photo of Gwen standing defeated, unsure and covered in mud in aisle 10 went viral, along with the story of a grocery store that was far more than that in this Letcher County community. Corporate IGA and the National Grocers Association and hordes of people from MDI, the distribution center in North Carolina, drove in with mops and checks and promises of loans. Father Jim Sichko gave her $20,000, and when she wrote him a thank you letter, he came back with $75,000 more.

Those donations helped hire back her entire crew after their unemployment ran out.

“I do believe God has brought us back,” Gwen said. “God is letting people see the miracle. He has surrounded me with wonderful people from IGA to MDI, they’ve been my boots on the ground.”

According to Carl Sivak of MDI, divine intervention is all that can explain how quickly Christon has outfitted the store with coolers and freezers that are usually on back order for nine months to a year. “To get this store back together in nine months is amazing,” he said.

Gwen and Arthur have owned the store for 20 years, but Joy and Van Breeding owned the land. Their son, Dr. Van Breeding, who runs the medical clinic in Whitesburg, decided he would just gift the land to them, which allowed them to apply for loans.

Hunt Brothers Pizza wanted to set up pizza sales in the store, so they donated a setup worth $30,000 of pizza ovens, digital signs and a display stand.

“The Lord has just put things in order for us,” Simon Christon said. “There’s no other explanation.”

Passing the torch

Like most grocery stores, the top of the walls are covered in photographic banners of meat and eggs and fruit. But interspersed between them are images of real people from Letcher County and the region, taken by local photographer Malcolm Wilson.

It was Simon’s idea because, he said, he’s always liked design, and photographs of local people would cement the IGA as a community center.

Wilson is a photographer who started the Humans of Central Appalachia Facebook page with his late wife, and has a repository of more than 20,000 photos from all over the region. The Christons picked photos for the store — the late Hope Campbell holding a Bible, a close-up shot of the roughened hands of a coal miner, a smiling boy selling eggs at a stand, banjo player Lee Boy Sexton, the golden sourdough loaves from the Black Sheep Bakery in Hemphill.

“It’s all about the community for us,” Simon said. “We’ve got to provide that. It’s their store.”

Wilson was thrilled. “To say I’m honored is an understatement, not many photographers get a permanent gallery for their work. I love these folks to death.”

The remodel includes a new community room where people can hold meetings or birthday parties or just hang out. Simon has worked on getting more specialty items and choices so this place can be a one stop shop.

It’s been a long time for people, who are now used to going to Whitesburg for shopping, and Gwen thinks it may take a while for their customer base to build back up.

But employee Michelle Maggard disagrees. “I think it’s going to skyrocket,” she said. “People are going to be so excited. This is a ray of light that shows people can work and not give up, that you need to keep your faith. If we can do it, you can do it.”

She puts it all to Gwen, who has been the center of Isom for a long time. Gwen exemplifies that good fortune comes to good people, karma or the Golden Rule or whatever it is.

“To know her is to love that woman,” Maggard said. “People literally come in because they were treated like family here. It’s something you just don’t get at Walmart.”

Gwen will remain in her perch in the office at the front of the store, but eventually she would like to cut back, rest a while and hand more of the business over to Simon. That may work out, too. Simon has a business degree and was supposed to start work at the ARH clinic in Whitesburg just before COVID. That was put off, so he helped out his mom, engineering a system for people to call in a grocery order and pick it up at the store during the height of the pandemic.

“Right before he was supposed to go to the clinic job in July, he said to me ‘I don’t think I want to leave, do you mind if I stay?’” Gwen recounted with a smile. “I said ‘I’ve been hoping for 25 years that you’d take to this.’ He loves the business and the community.

“It’s all about the love for this community. I think that’s the secret to the whole thing.”