Sweetfern Geometer, Mourning Cloak

What brought me to Portland in the first place? The triangulation of obligations to mother, sister, and son, yes, a chance encounter, yes, that was also unfinished business, yes, a lust for winter and the luxury of firs, no, not at first, and, in truth, I had planned to wander the eight thousand year old streets of Plovdiv, Bulgaria instead, which is why of course it never happened, (Jesus wept but God laughs at our plans, as the joke goes) but once I was here, at first for a tentative month or two and now as long as I can manage it, certain paths simply opened.

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard

(A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)

—Stéphane Mallarmé

I arrived sick in early September, an incubating sinus infection having burst fully formed from waves of mucus like a negative of Venus; I couldn’t lean forward without triggering a crippling headache. And yet, I suggested Sunday afternoon oysters to a friend in October. The second of my three prescribed courses of antibiotics came with an aversion to sunlight, and yet, of all of the dozens of places to eat an oyster in Portland, Maine, I chose one forty minutes by foot away. I limped there feverishly shaking under a red umbrella so that my weakened skin wouldn’t blister along the edges of my loud pineapple blouse.

We sat at the window slurping bivalves. I had sworn off the opening of restaurants. And yet, I saw the “for rent” sign in the building across the street, a notice that hadn’t been there the last time I walked past, and, as I soon learned, was only posted an hour before, too neatly coinciding with the moment I decided that this oyster bar, and only this oyster bar, would do. I took the number down, grumbling. I called the next morning, warily. I skeptically toured the space that same day, originally a butcher shop, sure, oh and a full basement, okay, nice wood floors… And all the while I tried to find a reason to say no, please, no, let me slide into penury in peace, but not once could I find one. The location, the building, the history, the scene, the price—I had never been presented with such an ideal opportunity. Five other people were salivating over the place that day (there is money in the industry here)— but I said I’d take it before my allotted time was done.

Each eerie coincidence sealed my fate like the locks on a paranoiac’s apartment door.

In retrospect it was greed, vanity and greed, vanity, greed, fear, and exhaustion, that led me down the path of bank loans and co-signers. I could have opened my new place scrappily, tenacity’s steel the pillars of a cocksure grin. I could have found a team of worker-owners and attempted for the third time to live up to my cooperative ideals. If I had taken either (or an amalgamate) route, I’d be open today. But the pipe dream of funny money, a bell here, a marketing plan there, and a line of credit to soften every blow, was too tempting and, as initial conversations suggested, entirely plausible. Perhaps for others, this gilded path, but apparently not for me.

But what would I call it? Or rather them, for it was instantly clear that certain unique features of the property would allow for two businesses as easily as one, a post-industrial coffee house on one hand, and a wood and brick locavore foodie destination on the other. And what of my literary dreams, deferred again by weak character and strange circumstances, how would I hold on to those? All this a-mingle—aflutter would be to show my hand—then joined with the bitchy spectre of Vladimir Nabokov mid-admonishment—led me to a day-and-night theme, a butterfly and moth concept, and, after researching local exemplars of each: Mourning Cloak (Coffee & Tea) and Sweetfern Geometer (Seasonal Dining) pitched from their cocoons and into my destiny.

Aren’t they pretty?

I think that is all I have in me today. I am still searching for partners and have some promising leads. I will probably return to some limited form of worker-ownership model, which, although it may not take me more than a couple steps from the gutter that threatens us all here in America, will be more “me” than some petite bourgeois, even if he would have a comfortable home with a private library, a fireplace, and a bed cozy enough to die in.

the witches are with me though… so how can I lose?