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Amelia Olson, owner of the Riverside shop Tall Tumbleweed. Photo by Grace Kimmel.
Last Tuesday morning, I quickly wrote to a customer, apologizing for what I knew would be a delayed online order for my vintage and new clothing and accessories shop, Tall Tumbleweed, located in Riverside.
Before I could finish my apology, I had to tell my kids “No!” six times, and I yelled at my husband for not knowing where my keys were. These were the telltale signs of any New England parent trying to desperately triage a state emergency that wasn’t declared a state emergency, all while losing precious income, and just trying to get by.
On my morning walk on Wednesday, the streets felt angry. People, under unimaginable pressure and stress, were at their limits. The internet was mad and mistrusting of the state. The schools were just trying to piece together yet another impossible-to-calculate-the-harm-to children “event.” The traffic control workers were trying to stay warm and patient with the commuters surrounding them.
The doom, the gloom, the anger and chaos, it was abundantly obvious. But what I have seen and continue to see every day, behind my notoriously messy shop desk, is radically humane, loving and sincere people, who are trying to live their lives peacefully, generously and humorously.
I see mothers and daughters repairing relationships that cracked in the face of hardships or generational misunderstandings. I see babies being born into families that will teach them to love and take care of the people around them. I see the elderly waiting for their buses, laughing at jokes I can’t hear from my sidewalk table. I see all the good dogs who prance down Bullocks Point Avenue and stop at my shop door because they know I’ve got treats.
And when my husband became paralyzed in a matter of hours from GBS over the summer, often I’d come to that same desk covered in bouquets, coffee gift cards, offers to babysit, offers to park in customer’s driveways near Miriam to avoid tickets, and homemade Portuguese dinners. There wasn’t a single person who came in who didn’t want to help or ease our family’s pain. Other local businesses even offered to work for free for us during our crisis to keep my shop going.
Everyone in Riverside and central East Providence showed up for my family, and the folks at Miriam were the most generous, intuitive, hilarious, compassionate and tough crew around. They carried us through the depths of hell and made us laugh and helped us navigate a system that was very confusing and isolating.
And now, unimaginably, last week we faced yet another bizarre and severe hardship. Every year we laugh and say 202_ was a bad year! And we find the energy and passion to wake up to a new year and try to be better. Because it can’t get worse right?
I think Rhode Island should provide economic relief to small businesses that were affected by last week’s highway debacle. I’m sure the money exists, but that’s not my job to sort out. My job is to show up at my tiny beach town clothing shop and try to denounce the notion that money is greater than the human spirit. That’s my business model.
There is nothing at my shop you need to survive. It’s a shop full of beautiful things you’ll need money to buy. And I pay my own bills with the money you spend on the beautiful things. But that’s just the necessary economic puzzle piece to owning a business that truly helps grow community. The real magic is in every way you decide to engage the people around you, whether or not they want or are able to buy your stuff.
What small businesses like mine create for our communities is invaluable, immeasurable and critical. When filling out the impact form sent by our city, I didn’t notice a box to check for a broken spirit. Or a box to check for closed doors when one of my Riverside teens needed a safe place to hang out but couldn’t find one. And that’s what these adversities stand to take from our community. Trust. Reliability. Support. Housing. Jobs. Safety. Joy.
For many of us small business freaks, we make just enough to cover the bills and take a few bucks home. No one I know has money saved up just in case we have a global pandemic or a spontaneously inoperable and hazardous bridge. We did not open our businesses to become rich. Lots of us, stitched together our life experiences to create successful, community-focused small businesses that just barely get all the invoices and payroll paid. We’ve done it with style, love, music, art, cooking, movement and humor. And I am not at all surprised at the ingenuity of all my fellow small business friends and customers during the bridge fiasco.
And I would like to see us able to THRIVE, as all of the evidence of our efforts suggest we are talented enough to do. But instead, most of us were trying to figure out how to stay open outside of business loans and selling gift cards (gift cards won’t save our businesses as an indefinite solution, by the way). This is not a hospitable or efficient approach to fostering strong local economy or morale. Plainly, the bridge is another example of citizens being tasked with the cleanup and strategy both financially and personally to overcome obstacles our elected officials and leaders failed to protect us from.
That’s shameful. I’m mad! I’m scared for my community. Perhaps more concerned for my community than my own brick and mortar shop. But I am not a city planner. Or an engineer. Or an accountant. Or a lawyer. Or an elected official. I am a nearly six-foot-tall New Mexican/ Norwegian transplant with no college degree or fancy titles to carry me through with ease or assurance. And this city is made of salt of the earth people like me, who simply want to live and love lightly, raise their kids, elevate the communities they serve and try to not die or go bankrupt doing so.
Rhode Island is made of thousands of micro small businesses that provide safety, inclusivity, jobs, community support and love. From my morning walk to Taunton Bakery and my last look out my front window at night, I see the love. I see teamwork. The neighbors helping neighbors. The small shops offering way more than a cute outfit or craft beer. I see the helpers and the doers and the healers. I see human magic.
Let this column be a tiny parade of appreciation for our beloved community leaders. For our mailmen, our baristas, our CNAs and service industry. For our grocery clerks and bus drivers. Everyone.
I’d like to paint a picture of all the compassionate, vibrant, joyful and generous ways we run our businesses and neighborhoods. How we continue to band together. Reject greed. Reject scarcity mindsets. I’d like to spend time celebrating the everyday hard working people who keep this city together. The families I get to serve and connect with everyday.
The news story is in the tenacity and brilliance of our citizens. Perhaps our parade will become so visible, it becomes a standard of measuring economic impact in the future.
279 Bullocks Point Ave., Riverside, 401-903-2869, talltumbleweed.com
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