Small Beginnings
Ray and I are back at headquarters today for the first time since our open house on June 28. We are feeling much better.
After the open house on June 28, we took the next day off to enjoy a day with our daughter and her children. That evening Ray felt completely washed out. We chalked it up to being out in the hot sun all day, but by Thursday morning, he was definitely sick. We thought he had caught the boys’ runny noses and coughs. The next day I was sick, too. As I told you, we had a quiet 4th of July watching A Capitol Fourth.
We went to the doctor on the 5th. He decided not to test us, but he was pretty sure we had COVID and recommended that we act accordingly. On Wednesday evening, I took a second at-home test; and for the first time saw two and not one line on the indicator—I was positive for COVID. We are both grateful that our bodies have waited until the most recent strain to succumb and that we are now both so much better and able to be out with our loved ones again.
One of my preparations for the open house was pulling together a slide show of the history of Notgrass History. I enjoyed the walk down memory lane. Today, I’d like to share some highlights of the last 23 years. I’m still pretty shy about including pictures of our grandchildren, so I am sorry for not sharing a few of the hundreds of the very cutest pictures I found, pictures of grandchildren playing at our feet while we wrote at our desks or while they traveled with us and our children to homeschool conventions. I’ll begin with a few pictures from the open house.
With all our hearts we believe that God has guided this effort. Ray said a few words just before the ribbon cutting and led us all in prayer.
Then, when we went inside, I told a little about how God had led us step by step by step from very humble beginnings to the place He wanted us to go, a place we had never even dreamed of.
We had simple refreshments of cupcakes, candy, and lemonade.
We appreciated the visits with many old and new friends, including Mr. and Mrs. Randy Heady. Randy serves as our county mayor.
Hope Vargas, director of the local chamber of commerce, joined Ray, Mary Evelyn, and me for a picture.
Our friends wandered around the office, the shipping center, and the warehouse while visiting with us, our team members, and each other. It was fun seeing many old friends reconnecting with each other, too.
This new office space is quite different from the one we had in the beginning. In our earliest years, we lived in Cookeville, Tennessee, and worked from an office in our basement.
We produced our first catalog in that basement office.
When the local newspaper did a story about our new business, John pretended to pack an order in our kitchen. At the time, we didn’t have any real orders to pack. That slowly began to change after we wrote our first history curriculum, Exploring Tennessee.
When we moved into our 1840-1845 house in 2004, we had been in business for just under five years, yet its one-room mother-in-law apartment housed the entire Notgrass operation. We even had room for an extra twin bed in one corner. Bethany and Mary Evelyn’s dogs used to hang out with us in that office. One day I swung my leg over the doggie gate on my way out of the office with this result, but it healed quickly.
In 2011 we were still doing everything out of that apartment and the room beside it. Our “warehouse” was literally in one corner of the apartment. Here are orders ready for shipping . . .
. . . and this is our book binding station where we continued to punch and coil many of our books by hand.
When the books were too thick for our little coiling machine, we coiled them by hand while we watched old movies in the evening.
What happy days those were. We had a dream, but God had much bigger plans than any that we had. Whatever your own dreams are, keep hanging on. Keep taking baby steps. Keep praying. God knows what He is doing.
“For I know the plans that I have for you,”
declares the Lord,
“plans for prosperity and not for disaster,
to give you a future and a hope.”
Jeremiah 29:11
I like the new color and look of the blog, it just looks like it got freshened up. I’m also really surprised that a doctor wouldn’t test for covid, the media and medical community are thriving on hyping up the covid count and constantly assigning numbers and taking tallies…just amazing to hear of 1 who doesn’t feel the need to add to the numbers game. There’s no telling what variant anyone has, the tests don’t tell that, it’s just a guessing game and listening to what the latest tale is. I had covid earlier this month, just had to keep on keeping on, like your latest post, I rested when I could but our family was experiencing things that I could not reset so I took Tylenol and just kept moving forward. I’m seeing almost daily that that is a lost way of life and that it takes very very little to convince people to come to a grinding halt and excuse themselves from their duties and obligations. I miss the old days when we used our own minds and knew what we needed to do and just took aspirin and ate soup and girded up our loins and stayed in the race. People had more character back then, I clearly remember my parents doing those things over and over for the good of our family and in taking care of us and each other. What a sorry example some of (most) these people are being for their children and grands. The quality of Americans has become an embarrassment to the perseverance of the generations before us.