A cold day in downtown Perry, with a good deal of ice after yesterday's thaw. Lucky, I suppose, we won't see any thawing for days to come. Well, at least it's sunny.
And the bookstore is warm. It's my day off, but Henry and Jason and I are at the coffee bar, with two computers and two cameras to work with. It's quiet - a few customers browsing, chatting.
Next week is our 3rd anniversary. It's starting to become a habit, having an anniversary, and not a novelty. I like marking the day, remembering that first day, when we just said "put the Open flag out". People who had been waiting and wonder when on earth we'd open came in, congratulated us, got coffee and bought books, and made our nervous first day easy. It had taken months of work, with setbacks, frustration, excitement, hiring, training, to get to that belated (you think January 31 was on purpose?!) opening.
It's a hard time to have a new business, or any business, with the economy collapsing. Perry's Main Street has been struggling for over a decade, too. The wisdom says that rural bookstores are the most difficult to keep afloat. And so--? We hunker down, cut staff hours and other costs, but plan and hope for the future. I can hope that we're at the bottom, because where can you go from the bottom but up? Rural areas may have it hard, but my father told me years ago that the Great Depression didn't hit so hard here - we were already *in* a depression in farm country. Some say that we don't reach the heights of prosperity out here, but we don't hit the lowest lows - our peaks and valleys stay in a smaller range. I hope so. I don't aim for becoming a millionaire, running a bookstore on a small town's Main Street; I aim to keep doing something I love, making enough to get buy on, for as long as I can do it, and hope to pass this place along to another generation after that.
It's reported over and over that Main Street - every Main Street - is dead. But I think locally, anyway, people are looking at the trees, not the forest. Main Street lives. Not in keeping the same stores - or buildings, sadly - for decades or 100 years, but in its ebb and flow, in a business running successfully for decades, then closing not for lack of success, but for lack of a successor. However, without businesses closing, there would be no room for new ventures. Change is life. Main Street lives.
A sombre musing for this sunny bleak day. I do look forward to celebrating our third year's completion, and oh, do I look forward to the day - I'm told not before the tenth year - when I can add "Established 2006" under the sign saying "Burlingham Books"!
