The Luxury of Time, Restored

My first lessons in hospitality came from my mother and my grandmother. My mother was never one for a house full of guests. My grandmother cherished it.

She would lean over the kitchen stove with one hand on her hip and the other working a big pot of something, sitting down between stirs to whip up a homemade cake with the biggest spoon I have ever seen. At dinner she would sit and watch us eat and talk and laugh. That was her greatest joy. Thirty years later I can still hear her: come on in this house, gal, let me show you how to make this or that.

My father is Andrew McCall. People around here call him the Vineman. He has been making baskets by hand out of twisted vine for forty years, and folks recognize one on sight without being told whose it is. He never advertised. He simply kept making them.

My mother and my grandmother taught me what hospitality feels like. My father taught me what it looks like to do one thing carefully for a very long time. Both of those are in this company.

Their teaching wooed me into the hospitality industry for thirty years. From pantry cook to Catering Director at Troy, Tuskegee and Hampton.

Food is a language everyone understands. It gets people talking, and with a full belly anything is possible.

Thime came out of my love of serving people. Of seeing them laugh, and enjoy themselves, and let their guard down. The same care that goes into building a beautiful meal is the care taken to settle a hopeful student into a new home, to have a house ready before a family arrives, or to mark a closing properly on a broker's behalf. It was never really about the food. It was about what the food did for the people at the table.

Thime is based in Auburn and works through Opelika, Montgomery, Lake Martin, and the communities between them. The corridor is small enough to know properly and busy enough to matter, and knowing it is most of the job: which contractor actually turns up, and which florist can be relied upon in the same week as a home game.

Where your life reaches past the corridor, the same care travels with it. In a city we do not know, we will say so plainly and arrange accordingly, rather than pretend to a familiarity we have not earned.

Most people who reach a certain point find they have arranged for nearly everything except their own hours. The house is handsome. The calendar is full. And somewhere in between sits an accumulation of small obligations. A vendor to chase. A closing gift never sent. A house four hours away that nobody has looked in on since March.

None of it is difficult. That is precisely the problem. Each one is small enough to feel unreasonable to hand off, and together they take the better part of a life.

Thime exists to carry them for you, kept by people who look after your household the way they would want their own looked after.