The Magnolia Story(28)

It seemed that wherever we went and whatever we did, Chip would always find some kids to mentor along the way. One late night we were at the shop unboxing some candles that had just come in, and Chip noticed two young boys walking through our parking lot. They were all of ten years old.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “It’s late! What are you guys doing out here on the streets at this time of night?”

They said they lived in the neighborhood behind the shop, and they always walked around at night. So Chip said, “Hey, you want to make a little bit of money?”

Of course the boys said yes. He invited them to come help us with inventory and gave them work sweeping and doing some other chores for a few bucks an hour. We always seemed to find ourselves at the shop doing something late at night, so those boys started dropping by regularly. “Hey, Chip and JoJo!” they’d say. “Got any work for us?”

Being able to mentor those kids just added to the value of being at the shop. I loved that. It was such a good feeling to see those kids fired up about doing some work rather than wandering around after dark, where trouble was sure to find them.

What I’m trying to say is that I truly loved everything about that shop. But the voice just kept on telling me, Jo, it’s time.

I wrestled with it for weeks until finally I felt it in my heart. I thought about the words of all of those women who were in my shop every day, telling me to cherish this time with my child. Soon I would have two children whose time deserved cherishing.

As much as I didn’t want it to be true, I could no longer deny that the voice was right.

I’m the type of person who can wrestle with something for a long time, but when I finally make up my mind, I’m all-in. This was one of those times. I was lying in bed with Chip one night, and I spoke it out loud. I didn’t pose it as a question. It wasn’t something I needed advice on. I was resolved: “Chip, we’re shutting the shop down.”

Chip was curious as to why I had come to this decision, of course. And I told him confidently, “God told me to do it.”

How could he argue with that?

In March of 2006 we sold off everything—the inventory, the displays, even the cash register. And it was hard. That shop was my dream, a dream that had landed on my yellow steno pad after I came back from my eye-opening internship in New York City. It was the first dream of mine that I’d seen come to fruition, and in many ways it was like our first baby.

Chip and I had remodeled that old shop with our bare hands. We’d laughed about how many nails had been driven into the old floorboards—there were thousands of them!—and thought about the guy who had put in so much time and effort all those years ago just to make sure those floors were as solid as could be. We were proud of everything we’d done to accentuate the work of those who came before us and to turn that quirky little building into a shop that exceeded the dreams I’d drawn out on paper a few years earlier.

But the shop was more to me than an accomplishment or even the fulfillment of a dream. It was something Chip and I had dreamed and accomplished together. From scratch. It wasn’t his business that I added to, or my business that he added to. It was ours. At some point every day, no matter what he had going on out at the various job sites, Chip had been there with me, sitting in that little back office at the desk right next to the Pack ’n Play, doing his thing while I did mine.

I will remember ’til the day I die the moment I stood on the front steps and locked that shop door for the last time as tears rolled down my face.

Even as I stood on those steps, trying to say good-bye, I kept asking God, “Are you sure this is the right move? If it is, why does it seem so painful and hard?”

That’s when I heard that gentle whisper, Joanna, if you trust me with your dreams, I’ll take them further than you could have ever imagined.

It is no easy thing to trust in God, to walk away from a career, to give it all up not knowing if you can ever get it back or even come close. But I did it. I heeded his voice, and somehow I found peace about it.

We put the shop on the market and hoped to find a buyer for that property as soon as possible. Obviously we wanted to respect it, the way Maebelle had respected it when she sold it to us. We still loved Maebelle, who had become like a grandmother to us. We used to visit her in the nursing home where she lived now and be her guests when they had pancake suppers.

But we just couldn’t afford to hold on to the building out of principle, the way she had.

We both would have loved for someone to have saved that old building we’d worked so hard to fix up, but there just wasn’t another Chip and Joanna out there who were looking for a property like that one. We couldn’t keep paying a mortgage on a shop that wasn’t open. So we told ourselves, “It is what it is. We need to move on. We’ll see what happens.” If someone came along and made us a decent offer, we would just have to cross that bridge when we came to it.

We considered offers from some other developers and business owners and kept trying to make a deal. But for some reason, those deals kept falling through.

What’s interesting to me is that just as Jo closed up the shop, Magnolia Homes was starting to rock and roll. At the very same moment we were trying to sell that building, we were also looking for some office space for the company. We needed a place where we could hire a secretary to do the books. But we also needed a spot with some outdoor space where we could store supplies and materials, and possibly have a staging area for “the Boys” to gather what they needed before heading to a particular job site for a day.