#family business

Noah Harrison

I'm Noah Harrison, born in 1996, the youngest of Mark and Susan's kids. I started working in the store around age twelve -- restocking, hauling, weekend shifts -- and by my teenage years I knew it wasn't the life I wanted for myself. I watched my dad wake up at four thirty every morning and come home after dark for as long as I could remember, and even though I respected the work, I wanted something different -- more variety, more time outdoors, less tied to one building. This photo's from a farm I was helping out at as a teenager, about as far from the store as I could get on a weekend, and about as happy as I remember being back then.

Susan Harrison

These days the thing I think about most is Noah. He spent a long stretch wanting nothing to do with the store, and that was hard to watch as his mother, but lately he's been coming around more, helping out, talking to Mark about the business in a way he never used to. It's a relief I didn't expect to feel this strongly. I sold my grandmother's jewelry back in the nineties to cover a tight month, and I never replaced it, but I don't think about that much anymore -- we built something real here instead, forty years of a shop that's still standing and a family that, for all its ordinary friction, always finds its way back to the table together. Most days, that feels like more than enough.