My parents operated a “Mom and Pop” small business selling new and used boats and marine accessories for 35 years until tonight. They started the business after my father was put in an impossible position at a job at which he was excellent. After a family member of his boss was given a supervisory role that my father should have kept, my father could not abide.  He thought carefully about his situation and his family’s needs, and decided to quit his job to make a new way of life for himself and his family.

I can remember the day my father quit his job. It was a Saturday and we were home together. He sat at his place at the kitchen table and slowly took the office keys off of his key ring. I rode in the car with him to his boss’s house to deliver the office keys. I was very young, maybe in the 5^th grade, and didn’t fully understand what was going on but I knew from my father’s somber mood that life had gotten very serious.

A vision for a new business was in my father’s head. He had been employed as a salesman and manager of a boating business for over 20 years and had the expertise to form a boat business of his own. It took about six months for him to secure funding, find the property and create a boat yard, office area, and boat storage units from scratch. I remember the tractors grating the property which had been a driving range. My brother and I found countless golf balls in our playtime as the business was being built. Each golf ball was prized as though they were golden.

The building that was moved onto the property for an office was a red “barn” style movable building. We always referred to my parent’s business as The Barn. Summers in the early years, my brother and I would play in the boats, pretending we were at sea. We would ride the tractor around the property and hunt golf balls. We always had fun there.

Skipping ahead in the story to 1984, several years after my parent’s business had been established, I was 15 and pregnant. It was a great ordeal that I have and will continue to write about. As it pertains to this story, I will share that my parents not only stood by me, they added a room onto The Barn so that they could care for my baby while I was in school.

Adam’s life had difficulties but my parents brought him to work with them every day and cared for him at The Barn. When he went to the school for children with disabilities, the school bus would drop him off in the afternoons at The Barn.

Over the years, not only did my parents care for Adam at The Barn, but they also cared for my daughter and my brother’s daughter there when both our families needed babysitting.  It was a real “family” business. There was no separation between work life and family. This one thing shows the level of commitment to family that my parents had, and that my mother continues to have, as she is at 83, caring for my brother’s kids when he is away on work trips.

The Barn had a kitchen with a small refrigerator and a hot plate. Most days my parents cooked up some good Cajun food and if a customer was hungry they were happy to feed them. The One Rule was: Wash Your Own Dishes. My mom and dad fed us often and made good customers and many lifelong friends this way.

I feel so honored and proud that my parents, as a married couple, worked together daily with faith to provide for us. They worked, fought with each other, cried, prayed and laughed. There are a million stories about unusual happenings at The Barn. My mother tells them with relish. Really—she is a great storyteller and some really unusual things did happen there in 35 years!

My parents were able to retire from the main boat and accessory-sales aspect of the business and enjoyed several years of retirement together until my father’s death in 2007. My mother continued to operate the storage rental business until recently. Over the past year, the property had to be returned to the original condition with only a few improvements left on it. This has been my mother’s task and she got the job done. Today was the day that the business was officially closed, accounts were liquidated and my mother fully retired.

Today I received a check for my inheritance from my father’s share of the business. It is a blessing and also a reminder of the great gifts from and significant loss of my father who was a great and gentle man. The check could be a large amount or small, depending on your perception and resources.  For me it is a seed that will help me buy more copies of Eating the Heart First to sell at readings, and a bit to add to my daughter’s savings.