A Stranger Told Me What I Needed to Know

Could an Angel Be Just Some Regular Guy?

Hunting Island, December 2024

Have you ever had a chance encounter that

left you wondering– wait, what just happened? Did you watch the person walk away and think, don’t go yet – who are you????

Maybe something like that happened to you.

It happened to me, two years ago, on December 23rd.

A stranger told me something. I paid attention. It felt important.

Today, my life is very different

than it was two years ago. I’m traveling full-time, in an RV with my husband Eric. This month, we’re on the coast of South Carolina, working as volunteers at Hunting Island State Park. We no longer have a house, what’s left of our stuff is in storage, and almost all the squares on my calendar are empty.

Two years ago Eric was a social worker. I had a small business. We lived in New Hampshire. We had a twenty-five year old daughter, Kiki, who lived an hour away.

That winter, I was finishing cancer treatment. I thought the worst thing had already happened. Cancer showed me how unpredictable life is, but still, I believed I could count on a certain kind of future. One that would include holidays with Kiki.

I thought I could count on Kiki there in the kitchen, in her blue striped linen apron, rolling out piecrust on the countertop. She always made three pies, even when it was just the three of us: pumpkin, pecan, and a third, experimental pie, different every year.

The week before Christmas,

I was busy with my business. I’d started the company five years earlier, selling blankets and rugs from Mexico. I’d thought turning a vintage trailer into a rolling boutique would be a fun way to reach customers. Eric found a derelict 1964 travel trailer for $200 and we fixed it up. The brightly painted trailer attracted people, and I spent summer weekends towing my shop-on-wheels to music festivals and flea markets around New England. I called it Blue Highways Trading Company.

The Blue Highways rolling shop

The first two years,

I made enough money to keep going, but when Covid hit, the markets and festivals were cancelled. By the time things opened up, chemo had taken my strength and I couldn’t load heavy bins into my truck and work a 10-hour day at an outdoor market.

I ended up renting space above a fabric store in my town. There was room to store my inventory and set up a little showroom. I kept the business going online but the money was barely worth it. Still, my identity and ego were tied up in Blue Highways.

It was the biggest creative project I’d ever done and everything, from my painted trailer to the notecards I tucked in each order, was a reflection of my taste and personality. I was proud of how I’d pushed myself to grow at an age when I could have let things slide.

In my fifties, I’d been hit

by a fresh wave of ambition and loved the challenge of running a one-person business. I felt younger and cooler than I had in years. I still had so much to prove. I wanted to make enough money to somehow compensate for the years I hadn’t earned anything. The years I thought counted as a failure because I was “just” a mom, a homeschooling parent, a caregiver, a sometimes-freelance artist and, most horrifyingly, just a homemaker.

While I was living those years, I thought what I was doing was important. It was only when I had an empty nest and emerged blinking into the “real” world, that I realized I had no value there. I qualified for a soul-deadening part-time job, at eleven dollars an hour, and vowed to start a business.

One day in the fall of ‘22,

I climbed the stairs from the sidewalk to my second-floor shop. Most days I felt discouraged. Cancer treatment had left me with little energy. My work felt lonely, consisting of packing orders, scrambling for customers, and always, the pressure to feed the bottomless pit of social media marketing.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped at the window and looked down through a sheet of icy rain at the auto repair place and restaurant parking lot. I was in the wrong life. Somehow I’d lost the thread and ended up trapped in my business.

A few weeks later,

a man came to my shop. It was the day before Christmas Eve. He was with a woman; she looked through the stacks of blankets and rugs while he talked to me.

The man asked a lot of questions right away, questions about my products, where they came from, and what kind of profit I was making. It could have felt intrusive but I didn’t take it that way.

He said, “I’m a consultant, I help businesses. I’ve helped a lot of companies make a lot of money“

My heart started to beat faster. Maybe I could hire him? Maybe he would help me get motivated again.

“What is your goal for your company? What is your vision?”

In the past, I’d have loved someone to ask me these questions. My business was the thing I was most interested in. But I didn’t say I wanted to make more money and grow my brand. I told him the truth:

“Well, I don’t really have the ambition I used to have. I had cancer and now I don’t care so much… “ I trailed off. I couldn’t believe I was getting so personal with a stranger.

He looked at me. “You know you’re done, right?”

He wasn’t asking. He was just stating the truth.

“You can find a buyer for your business. Or you can give it to someone. Find a young person who wants to do this. Sell your inventory. Or don’t. Let it go.”

I felt confused. Give away Blue Highways? Was he saying I was too old? Why wasn’t I defensive towards this stranger telling me how to run my business? Why did I feel a sense of peace? For the first time it occurred to me: maybe I don’t have anything to prove.

The woman who was with the man picked out several blankets and he paid for them. I followed them to the stairs. I didn’t want them to leave. I wanted to ask him, how do you know me?

I watched from the window overlooking the street. I saw them drive away in a muddy truck. I felt released from a burden I hadn’t even known I was carrying.

Had I just talk to an angel?

I was embarrassed to think such a thought. I didn’t believe in angels. I didn’t really believe in anything. But it had felt so strange, those twenty minutes they were in my shop. What even is an angel? Would an angel have a credit card? I’ll never know.

But I do know this: if not for him, I would have gone to work on Christmas Eve day, I would have tried to sell a few more blankets instead of being home with Kiki and Eric. I would have carried my discouragement and stress into the holiday weekend. I would have focused on the wrong things.

Instead, I had the best four days ever. I know, because I found this in my journal:

Dec. 23: I am happy and relieved. I am allowing myself to be on vacation.

Dec 24: I am done stressing about the business. Keek is here and I am happy… best Christmas Eve ever.

Dec 25: My mind is at peace. Enjoying everything.

Dec 27: We relaxed and talked and laughed. Looked at an art book together on the couch before Keek left.

The next time we saw Kiki, twelve days later, she was in a coma.

The angel couldn’t help me save my daughter’s life, but he redirected my attention to what was important. During those four days, the last days of our family, I was at peace, grateful, unburdened.

If you’re lucky, you get some of those times when you know, while it’s happening, that life couldn’t be any better. You’re paying attention.⁜

Epilogue:

There’s no tidy ending to this story. I didn’t sell Blue Highways, or give it away. After Keek’s death, I put the website on pause. I paid rent on the shop for eight months while we were traveling, and it remained closed until I was able to move everything into storage. It’s one of those “secondary losses” that most grievers are familiar with – the loss of work, responsibilities, and relationships that are too painful or overwhelming to maintain.

I’m still really proud of my Blue Highways Trading Company. I’m also beyond grateful that a random stranger allowed me to emotionally disengage, and accept ending the business, before Kiki died. It would have been so much harder to do after.

Notes From the Island:

December is our fourth month living at Hunting Island State Park. We’ll be back on the road and heading west on January first.

I hadn’t opened my bin of art supplies in the three months we’ve been here but last week I finally took out my pencils. I was kind of shocked at how hard it was for me to concentrate on drawing. I kept wanting to check my phone. I felt a regretful nostalgia for the pre-smartphone days when I could easily focus for hours at a time.

So now I’m focusing on focusing.

If I spend the rest of my life on the practice of paying attention, that’s probably enough of a goal. For now, paying attention on my beach walks is my joy.

This week I decided to look closely at the many patterns in the sand; patterns left by wind and water. On my walks, I sometimes take pictures. Framing what I see helps me notice textures and detail. The photos are not really for any purpose other than to help me see.

Unless you are a big weirdo like me, you are probably are not interested in the hundreds of different sand patterns I found. But I can’t resist showing you some of them here:

AND: Recommended by reader

Al Griffin

– if you like sand and phenomenal photography, check out: Sand Stories by Cynthia Gladys

Tattoo update:

I had to reschedule the appointment, and the big day is next week. Pictures will be forthcoming. If you don’t know about the tattoo, featuring Clementine (a chicken soulmate from another life) you can read about it here: A Chicken From a Past Life

Recommended:

I just finished a new audiobook, Here One Moment, by one of my favorite authors, Liane Moriarty. (I always listen to her novels rather than read, because they are narrated by Caroline Lee, and I love her voice.) Initially I thought, maybe it wasn’t good for me. It seemed like it was going to have too many tragic deaths. But it turned out to be a story about love and grief, relationships and precious joys – some that we take for granted, and some that we don’t notice until they’re gone.

The last section made me cry a lot while I was driving through downtown Beaufort. Moriarty ends the book with this quotation from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross:

“It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth, and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.”

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Friends,

I am going to take a publishing break in December. This is a hard time of year for a lot of us, and we all need to be easy on ourselves. For me, this means a break from deadlines, and from writing about difficult emotional stuff. I want to do some art just for fun, and spend a lot of time outdoors this holiday season.

I’ll resume sending regular newsletters in mid-January, from somewhere in the wilds of West Texas.

You’re welcome to leave a comment – I would love to know something about you.

Thanks so much for reading or listening.

Love 💛 Tina