Hampshire County

 Community Story Archive 

Sharing Stories, Creating Change

CHARLIE

Charlie grew up in Florence and spent the majority of their high school years during the pandemic attending LightHouse Holyoke. Charlie is currently taking a gap year to explore art and writing while teaching nature skills to children and youth. They will head to college in the fall. Charlie values eating seasonally and locally which leads to a greater appreciation for food. They share their thoughts on the important relationship between community, food, nature, and becoming a young adult.


"There's food that feeds your body and makes you survive and then there's food that nourishes your relationships and your soul [I’d like to see] more of that for everybody."


Check out some interview excerpts below:

"Knowing that college students never really have very much money, it's going to be interesting. Instead of having parental support for buying food, I generally like to eat pretty healthy and fresh and I know that tends to be more expensive and more difficult to get…. something to contend with."


"I love that with farmers markets, you can eat seasonally….I think seasonal eating is something that I don’t see very often in this day and age. It's a really cool, different relationship to food…having food that is associated strongly with certain memories and times of the year… The farmers market you have it when it's fresh, and when it's good. The supermarket, you can have it anytime but it's never quite as fresh or quite as good. It is a different experience."


"[What ]I learned from quarantining so young… is that anyone's childhood or really at any point in your life you don't get it back to do it over. It is what happened and the decisions you made are just the reality of the situation going forward."


"I think part of it was seeing a bunch of different perspectives among children… and my friends. Some of them were quarantining to protect people [that] if they get Covid, they will die…and that's a super heavy burden to have.  And there were a lot of people who were quarantining because our parents said so. It was interesting to see the different reactions to both of those."