It Ain't Over (22 page)

One of the boulders they had disentombed stood three feet tall and was nearly as wide around; Kristine felt she saw something in the stone and she wanted to bring it out. Using her landscaping tools, she began to carve. Soon the face of a woman emerged—eyes closed, lips pursed, with a contented expression. She looked as if she were sleeping.

“It was my first big sculpture,” she says. “I put it out at the end of my driveway, and when the sun came down the street, it would shine on her face. People driving by would actually slow down to take a look. After that, I was hooked. I carved everything I could get my hands on.”

Gradually, Kristine accumulated more tools—grinders, chisels, hammers, even an excavator that moved heavier stones. And everywhere she went, she checked out the rocks.

“If I saw something I really liked, and someone was willing to part with it, I’d load it into my pickup truck and bring it home.” She turned these raw forms into birdbaths, benches, and fountains, always careful to retain as much of their original shape as possible.

A birdbath, for example, might have a rectangular rock as a base, on which she balanced an elliptical stone whose center she’d hollowed into a bowl. Or an egg-shaped boulder might be converted into a fountain, a hole drilled in the middle with water cascading over the sides.

“It’s hard to improve on Mother Nature,” Kristine says. “I felt like I was just a tool to put the rocks together. The rocks couldn’t do it themselves, so they had me to help.”

Kristine began displaying her sculptures around her property and entering them in local art shows. As word of her craftsmanship grew, so, too, did the number of buyers. By this point, the landscaper who’d trained her was working for her occasionally, installing her pieces in customers’ yards.

After only a few months of sculpting, Kristine visited a quarry on the Connecticut–Rhode Island border where she spotted a pile of sedimentary rocks jumbled in a heap, half-hidden by dirt and leaves. They took her breath away. Formed beneath a once-rushing river, the rocks were striated with gorgeous horizontal layers of brown and bronze. Kristine hauled them home and worked that entire summer piecing them together into benches. When her hometown art museum paid $4,000 for one of the benches—which Kristine dubbed “Pinnacle,” because it represented the high point in her life—she was finally ready to say it out loud:
I am a sculptor!

“It was as if my whole life had led up to this,” she says.

That was six years ago. Since then, Kristine’s clientele has grown. Though she sells pieces at local nurseries and via Facebook, her main showroom is still her own yard.

“The garden clubs come here to have their meetings,” she says. “And painters bring their students to create pictures of the rocks.” A small birdbath might fetch $350, a fountain, $850, and a five-foot sculpture, $2,500. Some clients have a yard full of her works.

“It’s all one of a kind,” she says. “Nothing mass-produced, that’s for sure. That’s the beauty of the work I do.”

Gone for good is the sense of entrapment that Kristine once felt at the factory. Now she spends most of her days outside, clad in a face mask and
earplugs, operating her prized grinder. And when she slices into a boulder, the blade grinding and whining, the dust cloud surrounding her, she thinks of her grandfather and the love of the stone that he passed on to her.

“I’m a different person now,” Kristine says. “In the factory, I always felt sick. Now, out in the fresh air, I’m always happy. And things around me seem happier, too. Sometimes, I’ll be working on a birdbath, and I can see the little chickadees in the tree just waiting for me to finish. And when I’m done, I’ll fill it with water and they’ll come zooming in. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Oh, look what she’s made for us!’ ”

Mari Ann Weiss Cater, 58

Chicago, Illinois

I
n 2008, all five pillars of Mari Ann Weiss Cater’s life either cracked or crumbled.

First, her 18-year-old son, Nathaniel, was battling cancer. Then, Mari Ann’s husband of 25 years moved out. Three months later, the media advertising company where she had worked for more than two decades closed, leaving her without a job—or health insurance for her and Nathaniel. That fall, her best friend, Janice, died, followed in November by Mari Ann’s mother. It was, as they say, her annus horribilis.

“I was devastated beyond belief,” Mari Ann says. “I was scared. I really didn’t know how anything was going to turn out.”

Of course, caring for Nathaniel, her only child, was Mari Ann’s first priority. He’d undergone radiation therapy, but then made the risky decision to cut short his follow-up chemotherapy because the treatment had weakened him horribly. The good news was that the cancer, an aggressive form called rhabdomyosarcoma, seemed to be in remission.

“But he’d lost a lot of weight,” Mari Ann recalls, “and I had to be strong for him. So I only allowed myself to cry once a day, in the shower. I would melt down in that moment, but breaking down completely wasn’t an option.”

For the next three years, Mari Ann focused on getting Nathaniel back to college. She also struggled through an ugly divorce that left her vulnerable financially and tried to get a decent-paying job while supporting herself and Nathaniel with money from her 401k.

“Being an older woman, I didn’t have an easy time finding a job that matched my skill set and paid enough,” says Mari Ann. “I’d been a vice president responsible for selling multimillion-dollar advertising packages and managing 30 radio stations in the Midwest. I sent out dozens of résumés that were never answered, and it was humiliating to now be interviewing with people 20 years my junior who were telling me I wasn’t qualified. The few positions that I was offered paid $30,000 a year, not nearly enough. And Nathaniel and I were quickly going through my 401k.”

When Mari Ann’s friends suggested that she turn a favorite hobby into her new career, she’d just laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” she’d say. “With the way my life has been, my hobby is
sleeping
.”

The closest thing Mari Ann had ever had to a hobby was scouting for furniture and accessories for her home. “I had always loved going to thrift shops,” Mari Ann recalls. “I’d buy a beautiful mirror here, a side table there. I was good at spotting little treasures. And I wondered, could I turn
that
into a career?”

Maybe—Mari Ann had a close friend who had recently quit her corporate job in New York City, moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, and opened a consignment shop selling furniture and home goods. “I visited her and saw what she was doing, and I realized I could do it, too—I just had to learn how.”

So Mari Ann went back to Chicago, rolled up her sleeves, and started doing her homework.

“I came across an EPA report that estimated that 8.8 million tons of furniture ended up in landfills in 2005 alone; that convinced me that there would be plenty of people out there with furniture to sell.”

She searched online for furniture consignment shops in other cities and called the ones that looked good, asking owners if they’d be willing to share their insights. “I had experienced so much rejection when looking for a job that being hung up on or ignored didn’t faze me. When someone was willing to talk, I’d keep it simple and ask for just one or two bits of advice.

“One person taught me about pricing used furniture—the rule of thumb is that it’s usually 20 to 50 percent of the original cost, but if a piece is in excellent condition and the manufacturer is still offering it at full price, you can sell it for higher,” Mari Ann says.

Several dealers stressed the importance of researching every piece. “If I was selling an item, I had better have the accurate information on the manufacturer and value, or I’d lose credibility.” They also warned Mari Ann that working evenings and weekends was part of the job. “If I wasn’t willing to put in the time, they said, I should consider another line of work.”

But Mari Ann thought it sounded like a perfect second career. She scouted locations and found two side-by-side storefront spaces totaling around 3,800 square feet on Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s main shopping street. And they were right in her neighborhood.

“The South Loop, where I live, is mostly residential and had no home furnishing stores,” she says. “I knew people here would appreciate having a place to go and browse.” Even though the Michigan Avenue address would
cost her more in rent, it was on the lobby level of a residential building and had lots of foot traffic.

So Mari Ann took the leap, using most of the money left in her 401k to pay for a one-year lease on the store, which she named Urban Remix, and to buy high-quality, gently used items to stock it with: art, vases, lamps, rugs, small pieces of furniture.

“I got some pieces from estate sales, including chandeliers that helped to create the upscale atmosphere I wanted,” she says. She also started going to auctions. “I love them. They’re great fun, and very exciting, but you have to be careful. You can get carried away with raising the paddle!”

Because the shop space was austere—unfinished walls and a concrete floor—Mari Ann warmed it up by laying down luxurious used carpets and
hanging up dozens of mirrors and paintings (everything was for sale). Big windows facing the busy street allowed passersby to get a good look inside.

With no budget left for advertising, Mari Ann relied heavily on word of mouth, asking everyone who came into the store for their email addresses so she could invite them to parties she hosted for local artists or trunk shows. “It was risky,” she admits. “I would only occasionally put an ad in a free newspaper requesting furniture or announcing a sale.” But before long she had compiled more than 1,800 email addresses, and people were regularly sending new customers her way.

Starting the business was unquestionably scary. “I was nervous—and everything was at stake,” says Mari Ann. But she always reminded herself that she had weathered worse—
much
worse. When Nathaniel had been diagnosed with cancer as a sophomore in high school, “we were told he might not live that long.” But he did, and despite 48 weeks of chemo, he was able to graduate on time three years later.

“Looking back, I realize that the first time he got cancer, I survived by learning to focus on the positive. So when he relapsed and my company was liquidated, I did the same thing: I kept thinking that if I hadn’t lost my job, I wouldn’t have had as much time to spend with him as he recovered or to be with my friend Janice or my mother in the months before they died.”

The emotional support between Nathaniel and Mari Ann is a two-way street. “He has always been my biggest fan,” she says. “About two years ago, he wrote me a letter thanking me for making sure he never had to be alone in the hospital, for listening to him when he needed to talk, and for giving him advice without judging. The fact that he was so grateful took my breath away.”

Nathaniel has since graduated from college and is back home, having been accepted into a competitive entrepreneur training program at the
University of Chicago. He helps Mari Ann out at the store one day a week and is always there for her to bounce ideas off. “He is truly like a business partner to me,” she says.

Today, two years after opening, her store is an eclectic mix of items, from something as expensive as a Chagall painting and handmade Asian armoire worth $20,000 to more affordable things like sofas and chairs from stores like Crate & Barrel.

“I love the store,” she says. “You know, I took every cent out of my 401k to open this place. I could have used that money just to pay the bills and keep looking for a job that might never have surfaced, but I didn’t. I’m glad I decided to use it to invest in myself.”

“Here I was, holding this amazing creature that had found its way from the ocean to the river to me.”

Lori-Ann Murphy, 54

Willow Creek, Montana

. . . by way of San Pedro, Belize

. . . by way of Venice Beach, California

S
ome women are afraid of change. Others thrive on it. And if you have wanderlust like Lori-Ann Murphy, you seek it out.