Stay in bed, the small voice inside my head tells me.

I don’t like to stay in bed.

Stay in bed, it repeats.  If you get up, you’ll only make things worse.

I CAN’T stay in bed.  I’m too restless.  I have to fix things.  I have to make things right.  Or at least I have to meditate and commune with my spirit guides for guidance.

You’ll regret it. 

I get out of bed.

MISTAKE.

Nikki, my obese 10-year-old English Collie comes downstairs with me, eager for his breakfast.  While I’m fixing him a dish of chicken livers and kibble, he pukes at my feet.

Told you so, the inner voice chimes.

Nikki looks pleased with himself.  He has a way of making meaningful points with disgusting gestures — When the Westchesters next door come up and blow of ftheir guns and explosives and ram their ATVs up and down the roads and through the state land, all the dogs tremble for the duration of their time here.  When they head back downstate, Nikki finds a way to sneak out, drag his achy overweight body up a steep set of deck stairs, then crap in front of their doorway. 

He means what says, even if he doesn’t use words.

And today, he’s underscoring the point of my inner voice.  I should just stay in bed.

It started Thursday night, when the lab called to tell me that the cafe’s last water test showed coliform in the well.  In the disruption of the pandemic, we’d forgotten to keep up with scheduled maintenance on our water system.  

“You probably just need a new UV bulb,” the lab tech told me.  

So I texted the water tech.  He was gone for the July 4th weekend.  His advice was to sit tight, then call the office on Tuesday.  

We’d have to boil water at the cafe, and use the farm’s processing room to wash our produce.  

BUT, we could fix this.  We just needed to find the bulb, shock the well and flush the lines.  We googled it.

There was no reason we couldn’t do this ourselves.  I didn’t want to have to run the cafe with a limp.  I wanted it up and running with all-systems-go.  It’s July fourth weekend, traditionally one of our largest grossing weekends of the year.   We needed everything running perfectly.  

MISTAKE.

I spent an hour and a half Friday morning calling every water conditioning service to find the bulb we needed for our system.  When we located it, Bob took off on a two hour trek to retrieve it.  By afternoon, he was back with the bulb and the bleach to shock the well.  

It was 1pm and we were on schedule to have everything fixed.  But the well cap didn’t want to release.

“You don’t think I’m not supposed to be removing that well cap, do you?” Bob hears tiny voices in his head, too.  And like me, he ignores them when he shouldn’t.

With muscle and ingenuity, he got the well cap off, and in went the bleach.  

MISTAKE.

We turned on the garden hose, and out puked all kinds of nasty turbid water, stirred up from the well.

Google said this might happen for a few minutes.

But a few hours passed.

Word got out quick.  Larry, our contractor came by.  “Turn it off,” he advised.  Let it settle.  Wait 24 hours.

WAIT 24 hours?  We had bnb guests due in at 10pm.  We had a cafe that was supposed to be open at 9am the next morning!

But if we ran the water in the building now, we’d draw all that turbidity into the pipes, into our filtration and disinfection systems.  We could do major damage.

It was nearly 5pm.  There was nothing to do.  We had to close the cafe and cancel our bnb guests, who were flying in for a wedding.

No.  No no no no no!  This  cannot happen.  A host is NEVER supposed to cancel on AirBnB!  It looks bad for the farm, it looks bad on our record.  I tried to call AirBnB for advice.  I couldn’t get through.  So I contacted the guests directly and told them what has happening.  I looked up where their wedding was located and sent them a link to a cabin that was closer.

It was too expensive.  They didn’t want to pay that much money.  

Bob and I were deeply sympathetic.  We wanted them to have a great weekend.  We wanted them to have a good impression of Sap Bush Hollow.  We didn’t want them to have to come up with an extra $50 per night for a different rental.  

MISTAKE

We called around to every hotel and Bed and Breakfast in the area.  We found nothing.  So we called our friends Anthony and Vivian, who work in the city, but have a beautiful farmhouse just up the road.  They haven’t been up in 10 months.  We asked if we could move the guests there.

“Sure,” Anthony didn’t hesitate.  “But it’s not set up for guests, and no one’s been in there for ten months.”

We proposed the option to the incoming guests, agreed to meet them at 10:30 pm that night to bring them to the new house, then loaded the girls in the car and sped up to Anthony’s with cleaning buckets, rags, fresh linens and a weed whacker in the pouring rain.  We had five hours to remove all of Anthony and Vivian’s personal items,  trim around the house and clean it top to bottom to make it guest-ready.

We did it.

And then the guests cancelled.  AirBnB let them go into the pricier rental with no up-charge.  

And so we lost our cafe day.

And we lost our AirBnB rental for the weekend.

And I made my family spend four extra hours cleaning someone else’s house.

And here I stand on Saturday morning, with dog puke at my feet.

And I cry.  I cry, because I know there’s some kind of big spiritual lesson happening here.  And I can’t see it.  And I’m supposed to embrace my learning opportunities and take every opportunity to grow, but I can’t even get to a chair to meditate because there’s dog puke on the floor.

When I clean that up and go sit down to clear my head, all I get is static.  Not one wink of clarity.

Bob and I slink out to the woods and sit in the rain with our coffee.  We say nothing; we just stare out at the mist rising from the ground and listen to the rush of the creek down in the gully below us.  

We return home to find the girls have gone to buy fresh strawberries.  They’ve brought the croissants home from the cafe and baked them.  They’ve made extra coffee.

I don’t remember much about sitting there at the table with them.  When I’m stressed, I can barely eat.  But they push me through the motions of a family breakfast.  They talk me into a few smiles.  

When life gets like this, there is only one thing left for me to do.  I put on an audiobook and start cleaning. I think of nothing except finding dust bunnies and wiping down toilets and polishing faucets and changing out bed linens.  When the house is whipped into shape, I stand in the kitchen and seize all the fresh produce we’d bought in for Sap Bush Saturday at the cafe.  I begin dicing herbs and chopping broccoli and peeling cucumbers.  I make salad after salad: potato salad, broccoli salad, mozzarella salad, chicken salad.  

I surrender to the fact that there is a great spiritual lesson, and I haven’t yet figured it out.  But yesterday sucked, and it sucks not being in my cafe, and it sucks to think about how much money we’re losing and it sucks not knowing if or when I’ll get everything operational at the building again and it sucks listening to all the noise from the Westchesters next door, firing their guns and their fireworks and revving their fleet of ATVs.

That’s when it all strikes me as being so notably wretched, it’s worth commemorating.  Since Covid restrictions have lifted, our weekly Sunday family dinner has turned into a farm and family dinner, where our Nate and Jenn join us, and Kate and Joe even occasionally come from their new farm with baby Lark.  That’s just what happens this Sunday.  We decide there’s nothing better to do than celebrate the worst fourth of July ever.  We smoke sausages on the grill and feast on all those salads and on ice cream. We laugh at the circumstances, at the neighbors, at anything and nothing. I find myself smiling inwardly in spite of everything, so deeply thankful for people to love even when things are so grim.

And on Tuesday afternoon, the water tech comes.  “You don’t shock the well here,” he explains.  “You shock the water softener.  Then you can be more precise about making sure every line in the building is disinfected.”  And it takes us less than forty minutes to do the entire job. We replace the UV bulbs, he services the filtration systems, and pronounces all-systems-go.

He walks out the door and finally the lesson hits me.

Perfectionism.

If I could have been comfortable with a little imperfection, I could have saved myself a lot of grief and financial loss.

We could have opened the cafe and run it with bottled and boiled water, then waited til after the holiday for the proper help.

We could have kept the bnb running with a simple explanation to use the spring water for drinking.

And if we’d needed to cancel, we could have cancelled and let AirBnB handle the logistics.  We didn’t make things any better for anyone by trying to handle them ourselves.

But we tried to be perfect.  We tried to fix every problem ourselves.  We tried to hold ourselves to a standard that was impossible to uphold on that weekend.

And sometimes, we have to accept that our standards cannot always be upheld.  And the faster we can recognize that, the better off we’ll be emotionally, spiritually, and financially.   We have to draw a deep breath, say WOOPS, shrug our shoulders and move along as best we can.

I know that.  Now. 

 

Folks, don’t forget that my newest book, Redefining Rich: achieving true wealth with small business, side hustles and smart living, will be launching through BenBella Books this August.   You can help me get the word out AND earn a summer-long discount at our online farm store.  We are putting together a launch team of volunteers who can help promote it. If you’re interested in joining, details are at the top of the blog page at sapbush.com but basically, you’ll

• Pre-order a copy of the book
• Fill out our launch team form, which is found at the top of the sapbush.com blog;
• Promote the book through your social media channels
• Request the book at your local bookstore and library
• Leave a review wherever the book was purchased

But WAIT!  It gets better!  As an expression of my thanks, here’s what you will receive in return:

• A 15% discount code for anything in the online store at sapbushfarmstore.com, good through July 31, 2021
• A free digital chapter from the book in advance of the release date
• Entry into a giveaway for a signed copy of the book and a throw blanket from my store
• Official graphics for sharing on social media
• An invite to an exclusive virtual book club meeting so I can personally answer any questions you may have once you’ve received your copy.
• So please sign up – just go to sapbush.com, click on the blog, and the details are at the top.

This podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Meredith Ellers & Melissa Lines.

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Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.