Jack’s weekly guest blog

Now that our cafe is up and running and proving successful, it’s worth taking a step to the side and assessing how our life has changed over the last couple of years.

Two years ago Wendy’s book hadn’t been published, we hadn’t done the ‘booking down the road trip’, I hadn’t turned the basement into a habitable space and we hadn’t even thought about a cafe.

The publication of the book and the search for a ‘store-sitter’ (hat tip to Andrew Whalen and Wesley Hearp) to allow us to go out and do signings around the country put the little bookstore on the map and quickly resulted in lots of people (individuals and groups) coming to see us and the shop. We’ve really enjoyed these visitors. About a week ago we got the farthest one yet, coming all the way from Washington State just to see the Little Bookstore for herself.

When we moved down to the basement, that cleared our upstairs area, which allowed us to consider expansion of one kind or another. With the demise of our beloved Mutual Pharmacy and Diner the kind of expansion we wanted was decided for us! The cafe has brought folks in who buy in the bookstore and vice versa – win-win all round.

So, how has our life changed?

We are far, far busier than we’ve ever been, not just as the bookstore but as individuals. We travel far more than we did, and we are in touch with a whole network of like-minded folks around the world. It’s actually quite strange in some ways – we arrived in a very rural place as outsiders who had traveled a fair bit, and settled into a quiet rural existence. Now we are back out traveling and occupying common ground with people all over the place.

Although we can always retreat to the basement we find we now enjoy sharing time and space with Kelley and Sam, who run the cafe on the second floor (hence the name Second Story Cafe). They arrive before we wake and sometimes leave after we’ve gone to bed.

We still have a guest bedroom, so we continue to have friends stay over from time to time, particularly musicians and storytellers from the United Kingdom. That’s a good anchor to our strange new lives.

And I sometimes, in the midst of the cafe and the shop and the visitors swirling around us, think about a famous Scottish proverb, and laugh. If ‘the De’il funds wark fir idle haunds’ then he wouldn’t find much fertile ground around here.

Y’all come see us – or, as we say in Scotland: Come Awa’ Ben.