About Us

I’m not complaining. The commute is nice and the coffee is always good ‘cause I make it. And there is
something comforting about knowing my family is above me when I’m working on a Saturday afternoon.
That said, there is also the challenge of living above your business with a 3-year-old who knows her
mommy is downstairs and the family dog who likes to escape from time to time. Gracie has been known
to make appearances in the store by sneaking down the back stairs and arriving in princess dress-up
clothes or whatever else she‘s dreamed up. Last Saturday it was pink snow boots -and that’s all.
Thankfully the customer in the store at the time was a friend who found it humorous. I laughed and
promised to tell her high school boyfriend as I shuffled her back upstairs.

The shop is sort of like our glorified living room. I think that’s why people say it’s comfortable. There is
a sense of home when you walk in. You can sometimes catch what’s simmering on the stove or baking
in the oven wafting through the back of the shop.
Other days, just walking past my front door means walking past the business and I often find myself
stopping to chat with customers or getting caught up in a shipment that’s just arrived. I call it getting
sucked in. I try to remind myself during those times that these are my mommy days and I don’t want to
waste them being “shop girl”, so we pad up the back stairs leaving business behind us.

I find myself sneaking down in my purple slippers after hours to straighten the desk or rearrange a
display. The other week I logged an all-nighter in the same vein of my college cram sessions, but this
time decorating the display window ‘til 2 a.m.
It’s a challenge some nights to turn off the endless thoughts about the shop and I sometimes think it must
be because it’s just beneath me. It’s reverse osmosis -seeping up through three floors of my home and
working it’s way into my being. I am literally camped out over our “dream come true” or more like our
“dream in progress”.
I still like coming home to find a passer-by starring at our store window or peering into our little “engine
that could”. I’ve found that this little dream of ours is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.

There is the plan to eventually get a house with a real yard so that Gracie isn’t running down Penn
Avenue sidewalks for play time. As Mike and I remind each other from time to time, we just invested in
that “beach house” a little early and it happens to sit on Penn Avenue.
What I really hope is that somehow we are shaping something important in our daughter, that one day in
her life she’ll tell people how she remembers living above mom and dad’s business. I hope we’re teaching
her in some fashion that you should work hard, but love what you do. I hope her memories include her
escapades down the back staircase, her boo-boo in the front window and playing “customer” with
mommy.
The other day she said to me, “I like your store, mommy.”
“Thanks, Gracie,” I told her, “I like it, too.”


	Living Above The Store

We bought this 100-year old row home in West Reading two years ago with our savings and a few romantic notions about owning our business and living above it. We told ourselves it was a throwback to another time when a lot of “mom and pop” shops lived above their stores, when there was a main street and a Five and Dime. And so we signed on the dotted line thinking we had invested in an idea of the past, but still creating our own little Mayberry. Penn Avenue is lovely, but it isn’t exactly Mayberry, we discovered. It’s a bustling thoroughfare whose late night ambulance sirens or chasing police cars can often wake even the soundest of sleeps. And now we know that sometimes living above your business means you never really leave it, like the office job or the briefcase that sits idle for at least a weekend. My job is always just a staircase or two away. Sometimes I forget there is a world outside this little bubble we’ve created - home upstairs - work downstairs. Just a trip to the grocery store or the post office can feel like a trip out of the country.

		*Gracie Bell in front of the store and her home.*