Soon a light will go out

It's really sinking in tonight that everything is going to change forever in just a few weeks.


I was out tonight in town and headed home finally, traveling down a silent off -season road. My shop sits in a well-known cluster of brick buildings that have stood there since I was just a few years old, located at the corner of a beach highway intersection. As I make the turn to go home I can see the door and front window of the shop and the lights over the front display shines out into the courtyard. Every time I've turning that corner by the stop light for all these years, I've caught a glimpse of my store that I've taken such care to grow, preserve, nurture and love. A few years ago during the winter my light burned out and to make that turn and see darkness where the familiar glow always was seemed strange.  Now strange is going to become the new normal and that light will go out in just a few more weeks.


For the first time in almost half my life I'll be making that turn without seeing something that I built and that I poured my heart and soul into. It will just be another building to pass by once the life drains out of it in just a few more days, and I think to myself how very lucky I have been to have loved something so much.

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The many stages of saying goodbye

I thought I'd been through the challenging parts already. So many things this far have been far harder than I anticipated and I'll admit that for a few days earlier this month I actually breathed. In a way it seemed that some of most difficult tasks which had loomed on the horizon were completed and now there was no turning back.

I'd given the required notice to my landlord and after days of dragging my feet had finally posting the "closing forever" signs. I'd learned how to field questions of all varieties and varying degrees of rudeness and had even made a few feeble attempts to take some of my personal items home from the store.

But for just under two decades this store HAS been my home: it's where I've laughed, learned, cared, grown, educated, cried, and where I swore I'd never give up on something I loved so much. It was, as I'd mentioned in a previous post, the place where "I'd come out of the dark" as a shattered life was rebuilt and a new place in the world was created.

This shop where I'd connected with so many hundreds and thousands of people across the years, was so much more than "just a job" to me and to some extent when you run your own ship I think you have to feel that way. I made a mistake that will be hard to warn others about and difficult to explain; I'd fallen in love with my business. That's not something you should ever do I guess, because when if the time comes when you have to say goodbye, it's going to be so much more than just a change in where you work. It's going to hurt like hell. I know that now because I'm there.

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