“I need a lucky break!” I scream to all of West Fulton generally, but to my friend Corny specifically. She’s driving by as I exit the post office. I turn to study the door behind me, making sure it closes properly. As the cold weather sets in, something funky happens with that door and it stops closing. It’s only a matter of time before Bob has to repair it again.
“I got one right here in the back of my car,” Corny calls out her window as she pulls in. Her shaggy poodle, Sugar, pushes his face up against my rear window, eyeing the last of my frost- bitten patio planters, ready to bless them with a streak of urine.
“I need a better break than that,” I snort, taking my mail and tossing it on the seat of my car. “I was thinking more like a million-dollar book deal. Or at least a $10,000 windfall.”
“Would you settle for a check for the turkeys?” Corny steps out with her checkbook in hand and follows me into the closed cafe.
“Can you make it for $10,000 dollars?” It’s worth a try.
“What happened?”
The beer and wine license happened.
This was supposed to be a growth year. Dad and Kate really needed more help on the farm. We either had to grow to accommodate another salary line, or cut back and pare down to make it all more manageable. We’ve been having too much fun to cut back. So I needed to put together a plan to grow revenue enough to employ another full-timer. I did. — We installed the Tentrr site, created the frozen soups and stews product line, and applied for the beer and wine license with the intent of expanding the cafe hours for dinner on Saturday nights.
It was all more expensive than I projected. It was all more time-consuming than I anticipated.
Especially this beer and wine license. I thought I’d nearly jumped through all the remaining hoops when our town’s code enforcement officer, while doing a fire safety inspection, examined the beautiful kitchen hood vent I purchased back in 2016.
“This is a residential hood vent,” he explained to me last week.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Works great.”
“Well,” he looked away. “I’m not sure that meets the current fire safety codes. I’ll have to look it up.”
The following morning I had an answer. The hood vent is fine if I’m doing simple soups and stews, serving maybe eight to twelve meals in a day, which was the original plan. It’s not fine if I’m searing hamburgers, frying sausage and home fries in lard and cooking eggs in butter and cranking out forty meals in a morning, with hopes to do that many again in the evening. I built the cafe kitchen with the knowledge, experience and aspirations of a home cook. But I am now asking it to perform the work of a commercial kitchen. And according to fire code, I need a whole new ventilation and fire suppression system. Beer and wine license or not, my short-sightedness resulted in an expensive error in 2016, and now I have to make an expensive correction.
Plus I have to pay $6000 for the winter’s supply of hay.
Plus I have a $2500 bill for cattle.
And $3000 for the pork processing.
Seventy-five percent of our savings for winter has been wiped out before we even make it to the Solstice.
I tell my story to Corny and she just shakes her head. “Do you think people would be willing to pay $500 per beer?” I quip.
“Ha.” She offers to loan me the money. I have a back up plan, so I don’t need it, but it feels good to know someone has my back.
This is the business I’m in. Farming seemed like a financially troublesome industry, so I backed it up with a career in writing, an equally poverty-centered career choice. To put a cherry on top, I convinced my family to get into the restaurant business, perhaps the only other enterprise option as risky as the other two. My business portfolio consists of a highly diversified trifecta of losing propositions.
But I can’t walk away. I really love my work. I try to imagine selling the farm, selling the post office & cafe building, quitting the writing. But one inspires the other, and they each take turns paying a few of the bills.
I stop down at Barbers’ farm stand to pick up some vegetables for the week. Cindy, the owner, has seen it all before. She sells me the kale and chard, but pushes the two bell peppers I’ve chosen, the last of the season, across the counter at me. “Here girlfriend,” she says. “Peppers on the house today.”
“They aren’t from the day-old table,” I remind her. “These are from the last of your good peppers.”
“I can’t come up with $10,000 bucks for a ventilation system,” she says. “But I can cover you for two peppers.” Not a windfall, for certain. But I’m really going to enjoy those peppers.
I get home and settle in at my desk to face down these bills, calculating in my mind how much to pull from from different accounts, how I might be able to cash flow to limp through. There might be a way I can make it, provided nothing else goes wrong with the post office building. I reach for the envelope on top, from Don and Trish, who owned the building back when the cafe was an auto-body shop. It feels like there’s a key in there. They must have found an extra key someplace after they moved their garage to North Carolina and assiduously mailed it long. I tear it open. Two washers fall out on my desk, with a small note:
The enclosed washers are for the Post Office main entrance to lift it so it closes better. Especially now that winter is just around the corner. Feel free to call Don if you have questions.
And then, the letter. Words from Trish about their own small business — quick words about the dilemmas they face with their own growing pains. She closes her letter with news of her grown children and a few words of encouragement:
Continue loving on your family. They grow up too fast but you are doing a great job at slowing life down and soaking up the sunshine and memories.
I look down at the washers glistening on my desk. Fingering them, I think, this is the lucky break.
Windfalls don’t happen in my life, because it’s all a lucky break. The fact that I need a new ventilation system because business was more successful than we anticipated is a lucky break. The fact that my family chose to grow our business because we’re enjoying ourselves is a lucky break. The fact that farmers get along well in our community, feel each others’ pain and toss a few peppers at each other now and then is a lucky break. The good friend who’s willing to help me out of a financial bind is a lucky break. And the former neighbors and fellow entrepreneurs who remember me fondly enough to mail words of encouragement and two washers in anticipation of the next repair is just another lucky break.
My life is a string of lucky breaks. And if it weren’t for that dang $10,000 bill, I might not be sitting here tallying them up.
Ron Cleeve
You and your “groupies” are worth a million dollars, so what’s a measly ten grand, eh????
And, when the license arrives, we can ALL offer a toast to your success as one of the most versatile folks we’ve ever known. You guys really DO rock!!
Ron/Jeanne/Shilo/Shel
Shannon
Thanks, Guys. It’s been a dreadful slog. Its thinking about the customers and Green Wolf Brewing and Scrumpy Ewe Cider and West Fulton that gets me smiling again. This side of the curtain ain’t pretty as I go through it, though.