Sunday, March 14, 2010

Ten Months, Nine Days Later

Oh, all the little quirks and quotes and new playlists I could have added throughout the past 10 months and nine days. I'm actually coming up on a year since I last posted anything to this poor, little blog. I think I eventually had that fishbowl feeling and couldn't find the words without feeling terribly exposed.

I'm over it.

It's been a long fucking year. Personally and professionally. I'm coming up, like a groundhog or a crocus, out of a semi-dormant, kind of crazy place.

On top of everything else, I took on the bookkeeping for the shop, lost my mind and every ounce of physical energy. Bill picked it back up. We got menus printed, more baking accomplished. A new concrete countertop was installed (I'll link later to the website of our wonderful concrete counter maker friend). We've had regulars move away and new regulars slip into their stools at the bar. We've had things break. We've repaired. Staff has quit, been fired, moved away. New girls have been trained up and they save my ass on many occasion. Love love love my girls.

Ella is still tackling math but with grace and focus. She's transitioned from alto sax to guitar. We've bagged the 103 acres for a small village house in Johnson. I can walk to the shop in seven minutes. We can ride our bikes to the Hub to see music at night. Friends stop in as they pass by on their way to the trails behind our house to walk their dogs. We have people over for dinner or sleepovers if they shouldn't drive home. Ella, for the very first time, can walk to a friend's house to hang out. The house is sixty years old, as opposed to one hundred and sixty, so when you clean it, it actually gets clean. Life has become exponentially easier.

The old man, Roger Jones, who built and lived in this house for those sixty years was a beekeeper and gem miner. The basement was his lapidary workshop, full of machines for polishing gems and cabinets to store and display them. There's a cold room in the basement that stored dozens and dozens of mason jars of waxy honey... a few of which we got to keep. Now that spring is here and the snow is melting, we're finding these crazy veins of random stones and gems and seashells out back and alongside the garage walls. There are birdhouses all around the house, full of black sunflower seeds. Woodpeckers and chickadees and blue jays are the only birds hardy enough to withstand the winter winds. Any day now I'm expecting to see robins and finches and martins. Old carcasses of bee boxes still sit out there along the treeline.... skeletons of bygone bee communities. All winter I've been reading up on beekeeping and plan to start my first hives when we get back from Costa Rica at the end of April. In honor of Roger. I think he'd be psyched to have us in his house. We've placed stones and crystals in all the little nooks where he'd kept his. We eat a spoonful of his honey when we get a sugar craving. It tastes like flowers.

I just went through and read a few of my early posts... all the turmoil as to whether or not I should buy the coffee shop. Now, I can hardly remember those early, sleepless nights. I CAN remember the pure physical exhaustion of that first year, the feeling like I might crack that second year and now, entering into the three year mark..... I find myself wondering where it'll all be. I love what I do. I can't fathom doing anything more enjoyable. I can't imagine a better community to share my everyday life with....people who influence my daughter in amazing, crazy and sometimes comically scary ways. I don't have a conscious feeling of burn-out but I imagine that it's there... lingering under the epidermal layer of my energetic facade. At thirty-six, or almost thirty-six, I can't imagine that I can be superhuman enough to maintain this level of constant motion. Or if I want to.

I'm just now, after seriously neglecting myself for the better part of two years, starting to be more mindful. I'm doing yoga more regularly, going to the gym again, hiking more rigorously. I've stopped licking the spatula when I make brownie batter or coffee cake. I've stopped eating sandwiches at the shop. I've started going to a chiropractor and eating more seaweed. I'm hydrating. I'm spending the month of March drinking no booze. Nada. Ella and I have challenged eachother to a sugar-free month of March, as well. We're both realizing how terribly addicted we are to the stuff. It feels good to be getting back. I have more energy, a clearer head, enjoy myself more.

People still steal my pint glasses and the landlord is still a pain in the ass. The oil to heat that old Victorian costs an arm and a leg (where the hell did that catch phrase come from, anyway?) and sometimes, in the middle of my afternoon there, I want nothing more to be on my couch with a book or in the woods with my dogs. But that would be the case with any job. Years from now, when I'm off doing something else with my life (and what the hell is that gonna be, anyway???) I know, for sure, that I'm going to look back on these years, with this coffee shop, and these people, as the absolute most favorite years of my life. Till that time comes, I'm just gonna live the dream. Keep expending energy. Keep making friends. Keep taking care of myself so I don't crack.

1 comment:

p said...

and i'm still here waiting...a year later to read a post as good as this one. and here it is. and i love hearing your life. and i love and miss you.