A New Season
When we were seniors in college, we inevitably got asked the proverbial question, “So, what are you going to do after college?” To be honest, we both didn’t know. I was set to graduate with a political science degree with an emphasis in pre-law. And Casey was an English major with a minor in Spanish. We were both liberal arts majors. I had interned at a law office and had seriously considered going to law school. I had also worked as a paraeducator in a classroom for children with disabilities because I thought I might want to go into the teaching field. But to be honest, we both didn’t know where our path was leading. Life can be tumultuous in your twenties. There’s much to do and accomplish and you are trying to figure out where you fit into it all.
We decided to start being facetious when people would ask us that question. Be careful what you say! I started saying, “Well, we want to live in a cabin in the woods and own a coffee shop.” I’m serious! I would just say that because at least it was a plan even though we didn't really have a plan to do that. When we graduated in June of 2009, we decided that we would try and live in Casey’s hometown of Oakhurst. After a lot of thought and prayer, we felt like that was a great place to start our married life together. But, we both didn’t have jobs after graduation and we didn’t know what we wanted to do career wise. We both knew we would love to do something that was working together but we weren’t sure how to make that happen. At one point, we had everything together to go backpack South America for a few months, just to take advantage of being free before starting our new life.
But alas, life took one of it’s many turns and we found out right before our wedding in August of 2009 that the local coffee shop was hiring and was looking for two people. We both got hired on the spot. We also really did end up living in a cabin in the woods. We found a rental that bordered on National Forest Land and it was so isolated that we had to drive to a different spot to get cell reception. Be careful what you say, even when joking, because It might come true!
The town where we went to college was rife with independent coffee shops. We were always in one of them studying and drinking good coffee. I think that’s where our love of coffee first started. But, I never imagined myself becoming a barista after college. We started working at the shop a week after we were married and we began to really like it. A month into working there, the owners told us they wanted to sell the business and asked if we were interested in buying it. Of course we were! But, we were also 22 years old, newly married, didn’t have enough credit and hardly any savings. To say it seemed impossible is an understatement. We began to think of any way we could make it happen and really started to pray that somehow we could come up with the finances. We both tend to be intuitive feelers and both had a resolve that it was something we were meant to do. Deep down, I really believed somehow, someway it would work out. A few weeks into the proposition and without asking anyone for help, a family member told us they really believed that it was something we would be good at and they offered to take a loan on in their name and we could make payments to them directly. We were stunned!
On October 1st of 2009 we opened for the first time as business owners of the little coffee shop. I can remember the exact dress I wore and the feelings of hope and anticipation. We were living out a dream that we had never really even considered could actually happen. It was a good thing that we both had the resolve that it was something we were meant to do because we didn’t know it at the time but some of our darkest days loomed ahead.