Neighbors Who Nourish
The Licking County Aging Partners provides thousands of meals daily.
Meet the people powering Meals on Wheels.
The long metal kitchen countertop is completely lined with trays, stacked in sets of 50 or so. Over the last few days, Amanda Morrow has labeled and organized roughly 1,000 trays.
“Just work, work, work,” she said.
Morrow has been date-labeling food trays for the last few hours. She’s made her way through all of the three-compartment trays and has been working on the larger two-compartment plates.
In her left hand, she wields a gray expiration label gun, which she stamps with orange stickers with the date. In her right hand, she grabs each tray. Grab, stamp, stack, repeat.
She silently continues working around the sound of the kitchen. Rock music plays from the speakers, employees talk among themselves, large fans blow hot oven air to keep the kitchen cool. None of it fazes her.
Morrow works as a kitchen aid for the Licking County Aging Partners, who provide services to the aging population in Licking County, including transportation, social events, and luncheons. Additionally, the LCAP provides Meals on Wheels — a service that delivers prepared meals to individuals at home — to the county.
The kitchen is only the starting point.
Morrow has been up since 6:00 a.m. to make sure she makes it on time for work. Today, she puts on her “Dollywood” baseball cap, a gray LCAP t-shirt, and a pair of purple tennis shoes. The back of her shirt reads: “Aging is so cool, everyone is doing it!”
She quickly grabs breakfast — a blueberry muffin today — as she prepares for the day ahead. Last in her morning routine, Morrow makes her bed nice and tidy. Her father, a retired lieutenant colonel, instilled the habit.
“I make my bed before my ride comes. Sometimes when my ride comes too early, my parents usually help make it. But sometimes when I was little, when I cleaned my room, he used to have me salute.”
While making her bed, Licking County Transit arrives in a short white bus to drive Morrow to work every day, Monday through Thursday. Morrow likes the schedule. The routine keeps her organized.
At 7:30, Morrow fills up her pink Stanley water bottle, clocks in, and gets to work.
“The proudest I ever felt like when I got employed here; that was my proudest moment. I was having lunch, and my mom was looking at Indeed. She saw that the position here was open, and she sent an application for me, and I got hired on the spot… It felt really good.”
Morrow, who turns 40 this May, has been on the kitchen team since 2008 when she joined as an extra volunteer hand for the kitchen. She had held other jobs before this position, but this one felt right. Over the years, Morrow's responsibilities in the kitchen have grown from a volunteer to a part-time employee.
Morrow has been unboxing frozen hamburger patties for the last few hours.
She picks up a few in large stacks and uniformly places them on the flat silver tray on her right.
Steve Deedrick works at the Licking County Aging Partners delivering meals to seniors on his route. Follow along to take a glimpse into Steve's work-life.
Next, Morrow tackles a three-by-six stack of frozen hamburger patties. When all 18 patties are placed neatly in orderly lines, she slides the tray on the shelved cart to her left. The cart towers over Morrow, so when only the last few slots are left at the top, she has to lift herself up on her toes to slide the metal tray into place.
Morrow says she walks an average of 4,000 to 5,000 steps a day just from maneuvering around the kitchen. Her orange FitBit bounces up and down her wrist as she pushes the metal cart into the industrial-sized freezer.
Morrow tries to keep active as much as she can ever since a blood clot health scare in 2010. She started exercising more by taking walks around the neighborhood and eating healthier.
That shift toward a healthier lifestyle eventually led her to pick up golf through the Down Syndrome Association of Central Ohio. The program is completely open to golfers of any skill level, even though Morrow humbly boasted she’s “really good.”
Yet, what she loves most to do is dance. She dances at work, just a little shimmy as an upbeat pop song plays from the speakers. Or when she’s back at home, where she puts on “Just Dance” videos. She ends every day with dancing.
Back in the kitchen, Morrow is bagging meals alongside the other kitchen staff. They have an assembly line to quicken the pace.
Morrow starts at the head of the line by grabbing plastic bags and dropping a carton of 2% milk inside. The bag then gets passed down to get a fruit cup, a condiment to accompany the meal, and then sealed. The sealed bags then get sorted into crates labeled by town to be sent out alongside the hot meals made tomorrow morning.
“I usually go to the Down Syndrome Association, and my friends there are talking about their dreams, how they want to be a supermodel, or how they want to be famous, or something like that. But my dream is something like this. ... I don't even think about me. I think about people. I think about other people.”
Tyler Thompson writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.
Built with Shorthand