But we were proud of that house. We didn’t think anything of it. We were excited to have all of our friends from college there to see what we’d been up to and to celebrate Chip’s thirtieth birthday together.
I was thirty years old and still living by the seat of my pants. I probably should have had my life together a little bit more by then. But the thing was, my friends all had these stressed-out lives, and they came to our place and it felt like we were just living this laid-back, beautiful, no-stress life. We made being poor look fun. All these corporate friends of ours were thinking, Well, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad to stay in Waco.
It wasn’t just my friends that made that party special, though. My grandma was still alive, and she came to that party too. She was just the sweetest lady in the world. She had single-handedly raised my dad and his brother. And though she had a very tough life, you would have never known it by her attitude. Between my mom and my grandma, I was definitely genetically built for positive optimism. That day with her is one of my fondest memories, because she and I hung out on one of those bales of hay for what felt like hours. It wasn’t but a couple years after that she went to be with Jesus.
We made all kinds of big memories in that tiny house, and we were just getting started. The fact that we had some profits starting to roll in from my little shop on Bosque only added to the sense of security we were building.
It’s hard to describe the feeling that comes with starting your own business. It really is so much work in the beginning that you lose yourself in it. You lose your sense of time, and you can’t believe how quickly the days go by because there’s no time to focus on much of anything else. But then you open the doors, and it’s like you’ve given birth to this new thing that didn’t exist before. Then when it starts to flourish, well, that’s just icing on the cake. To get to see it live and breathe and to know that this thing you created out of thin air can put a smile on other people’s faces is such a blessing.
There were some women who would come into that store and drop fifteen hundred dollars in a single visit. It was unbelievable. But I think one of the favorite customers I had in that first year of Magnolia was a woman who didn’t ever buy a thing. She would just show up now and then and poke around, and she told me one time, “I just come here because I want to be in here. This place inspires me.”
That was just about the greatest compliment I could ever imagine. She affirmed for me that I had accomplished exactly what I’d set out to do, and that made me even more passionate about creating an experience for my customers. I worked every day to come up with new touches that would make the experience memorable. I never got too comfortable with one particular look or design. I wanted to constantly challenge myself and make it better. If people were going to go out of their way to come into my store, I wanted to make sure it was worthwhile, whether they bought something or not.
Magnolia was my baby—no doubt about that. But it wasn’t long before I found out it wasn’t the only baby I was going to have.
SIX
WHITE PICKET FENCES
I’ve been asked from time to time how Chip and I manage to juggle all the things we did—and still do. I honestly don’t have a good answer for that, other than to go back to the notion that we seem to energize one another when we’re together. Although one explanation for where we find a little “extra” time in our days is the fact that since we got married we have never had a TV in our own house.
That is one question I always field on Twitter, “Hey man, why doesn’t Joanna ever set up a TV in any of these homes?” I think they are implying I need to turn in my man card. But this is actually the answer to that question.
Before we got married, the two of us attended a few premarital counseling sessions with Chip’s friend and one of his mentors, Byron Weathersbee, and his wife, Carla. Byron had played a significant part in Chip’s life as a college student, and since then, Chip sought Byron’s wisdom on lots of things. Chip and I felt that applying that same logic to our marriage—getting advice from these two trusted and seasoned marriage pros—couldn’t be a bad thing. We wanted to start a habit of seeking outside opinions just to make sure we were thinking about everything a new couple ought to think about as we started our new life together.
One of the things Byron and Carla suggested was that we try to stay focused on each other and spend quality time doing things we loved together, especially when we were at home. That seemed like a no-brainer to us, but they explained that being in the same house and actually interacting with each other are two different things. Sometimes it’s easy for couples to get lost in their own little worlds at home—to be so focused on other things that they aren’t really together, even when they’re in the same room.
To counter that tendency, Byron and Carla suggested we try to go the first few weeks of our marriage without a TV. The idea was to find other ways to occupy our time, especially in the evenings, with activities we could truly share. It seemed like reasonable advice, and so we tried it.
Well, six months later, neither one of us had the slightest urge to get a TV. We never even found time to miss it. All our various projects kept us busy during the day. And our evenings were pretty filled up with making dinner and finishing up the day’s business, talking and dreaming together, and making plans for the next day or the next week. We couldn’t imagine setting aside even an hour to sit and watch TV.
That’s not to say we never slowed down. Reading a good book, flipping through magazines, learning new card games together, taking walks together—we found a million ways to enjoy some down time.
Now, to be fair, we’ve caught our share of TV at our friends’ homes or at our parents’. Any time there was a big game or a fun show, we would find a way to catch it at a restaurant or make a date of it at a friend’s house. So, we managed to catch up on some of our favorite shows through these outlets.
We’ve had more than thirteen years now without a TV, and I don’t feel like we’ve missed a thing.
Just when we thought our lives couldn’t get any busier—just as we’d settled into that little white house and my store was getting off the ground—I received the wonderful news that I was pregnant with our first child.
Just the thought of having a baby filled me with all sorts of new inspiration, not the least of which was imagining the room I wanted my baby to come home to. The tiny second bedroom in that eight-hundred-square-foot house needed a complete makeover to turn it into a nursery, and thinking about that actually spurred an idea that gave me a new perspective on decorating.
I had made the décor in our second home more cohesive than the ones in the yellow house. The colors were continuous, and the rooms all tied together rather than each space having its own theme. My store was so busy that I kept finding new furnishings and swapping them in and out between the store and our home, and I felt like I was starting to get a hang of this thing called decorating.