Not long after we bought our house, a couple from California bought two run-down buildings just across the highway from us. One was a little adobe building, which they moved into temporarily while they fixed up the other one. In a matter of months they had transformed it from a nondescript rectangle into something straight out of an old western movie set, and the sign on the front read "Heartland Antiques." I was all atwitter, and couldn't wait for it to open.
When the day finally came, I rushed right over, eager to meet my new neighbors and have a friendly chat (though DH would probably describe it more as "pumping them for information"). What I discovered was that they were actually native Texans, but had lived in California all this time because the husband was in the movie-making business, and he was the visionary behind the creative transformation of the building. I also discovered that they were in the process of building themselves a home on a beautiful piece of property fronting Lone Man Creek, just down the road from us. Once it was completed, they planned to move out of the adobe building, and were looking for someone who might be interested in opening a restaurant there. They already had a bakery lined up to go in a space on one end of the building their shop was in, and the final touch would be, hopefully, to find a great little garden art and accessories shop to go in on the other side. Wow. When these people make retirement plans, they plan big, huh? And here we just stumbled across a strange little house in a place we loved, and decided to see what unfolded from there!
It must have been another year before their home was finally complete, but when it was, it was really something to behold! Another scene straight out of a movie set - perhaps one titled "Heidi Meets Bonanza"? By then the bakery had already come and gone, no garden shop had materialized, and business at the antiques shop was really slowing down. The problem for me was that it was filled with massive pieces of furniture that I no longer had need of, beautiful as they were, and very little of the smaller knick-knacks that might keep me coming back on a regular basis. Then the owners came up with another idea: open their own little coffee shop in the former bakery site, complete with drive-through window, to nab all those Austin commuters. Brilliant! Or at least, I thought so. Finally I had a place that made delicious chai lattes, in walking distance from my home!
Alas, that didn't work out too well either. They eventually shut both businesses down, and put their new house up for sale as well, though I'm not sure if they ever sold it. They did finally find a buyer for the little adobe house, but the antiques shop has been sitting empty and forlorn for a couple of years now. It puts me in a funk each time I see it, because I can't help but remember the light in the owner's eyes the day I met her, at the thought of all her dreams finally coming true.
But wait, what is this? Some equipment has been showing up in their parking lot, bit by bit. Now some workers are over there doing something. In fact, I do believe they are actually adding on to the building! Did they finally sell it, or did they keep it and decide to open a different kind of business? What's it going to be? Some might think I'm nosy, but I prefer to think of it as professional curiosity. All I know is, it's making me
nuts, that I can't find any answers!
Woohoo, lookie what I found! No, I didn't get any answers, but I did find their daughter's website (she's a realtor in Austin). Well, I guess I got the answer to one question - both their house and business have sold. But if you go to
this site quickly, you can enjoy a virtual tour of both buildings, and you just gotta see this house! (the house is the second featured property, the business is the third)
P.S. Many thanks to hillcountrysunset.com for the above image.
Posts
Well, I really had no intention of writing about food again so soon, but then I read Heather's post this morning, over at Beauty That Moves. What a can of worms she opened! She asked her readers to confess how much they spend on food each week, and wondered how so little can cost so much, especially when one is not buying any packaged foods, and is cooking everything from scratch? Instantly, the comments started rolling in, and reading through them just about broke my heart.
We are at the point in our lives where I no longer have to worry about every penny I spend on food, but to hear about what these young mothers must go through to try and feed their families good healthy food, really made me sad. They all asked the same question: must one completely eliminate organic/non-GMO fruits and veggies from one's shopping cart - the most important medicine we have - in order to stick to a budget? It reminded me of the most disturbing thing I saw in the movie Food, Inc. An Hispanic family was in their car, filling up on junk from the dollar menu at a fast food place, while they explained to the interviewer why they couldn't afford to buy fresh fruit or veggies. The father has type 2 diabetes, and they must spend several hundred dollars a month on his medications. That doesn't leave much for food. So they have a choice. They can spend $5 to buy a bag of greens and an apple or two, which would leave them all feeling hungry, or they can fill up from the dollar menu. How sad is that, since the dollar menu is what gave him the diabetes in the first place, and is probably going to kill him?
I felt compelled to leave a comment myself: As everyone else has said, I don't know any way you can reduce your food bill and still eat healthy produce, other than growing more of it yourself. I was fortunate enough to help start something wonderful here in the Texas Hill Country, called The Bountiful Sprout, a member-owned and operated food buying community dedicated to making sustainably and locally grown or produced foods and staples more readily available. We let the producers set their own prices, list what they have for sale on our website, members shop from the comfort of their homes, and come to our local pick-up spot every other Wednesday to retrieve their booty. We've virtually cut out all the middlemen. So why aren't members buying more, and why is the food still so expensive?
Well, because raising free range chickens and grass fed pork costs a lot more than the way Tyson does it, where their average producer carries half a million in debt, trying to meet their standards for equipment, etc., but only earns $18,000 per year, and the conditions of the animals would make you vomit. Then there are the government subsidies that go, not to the independent growers of sustainable foods, but to the humongous agribusinesses, encouraging them to grow nothing but corn and soy, which in turn becomes high fructose corn syrup and other things that end up on the dollar menus, making the food artificially cheap. So, I don't know what the answer is, other than, as I said, growing your own.
Oh yeah, and doing whatever you can to convince the government to change the way they dole out subsidies would be a very good thing, too. Denmark is light-years ahead of the US when it comes to sustainable living, and one of the first things they did, decades ago, was to start subsidizing the organic farmers, to bring down the cost of the food, thus improving the nation's health and the environment, and thereby lowering medical and pharmaceutical expenses. It would appear to be a no-brainer, but then, I guess that's what we have in our legislature - a bunch of no-brainers.
P.S. Did you see that survey that came out a while back, about which countries had the happiest people on earth? Know which was #1? You guessed it, Denmark! Where was the U.S.? You don't even wanna know. It's all about priorities, people!