Innkeepers at last!
The most romantic gesture my husband ever made was this:
He remembered something I said.
For those of you who have been married a while, you'll understand that this is quite remarkable. Don't take it personally, guys. Wives do it too. It's just a fact of life that we don't always pay attention.
But Jim did. He heard me mention a "someday" dream and he remembered it years later.
The year was 2004. We had just sent our two daughters off to college, we were living in a fairly new maintenance-free home, and we had no plans to move.
Jim came home from the grocery store with the local real estate Home Guide. I didn't pay attention. We didn't plan to move. Never discussed it. The topic never came up at the dinner table. Nope. Not at all. Not moving.
A few days later, Jim asked if I had noticed the listing for an old brick house in Gnadenhutten. Gnadenhutten????!!! Why in the world would I want to move there?
Here's what he said, and it sealed his fate as Best Husband EVER.
"I remember you saying you'd like to have a bed and breakfast some day, and I think this might be the house."
And Brick House on Main Bed & Breakfast was the result.
This lovely old home had just been sitting here, waiting for us to come along. Many had looked at it, but the house waited for Jim to find it. I won't bore you with the details, but it became more and more evident as we looked at the house and fell in love with the house and made arrangements to buy the house... that we were the people the house had been waiting for.
Our renovation of Brick House on Main was a labor of love. We spent seven years updating everything so it would be perfect for our opening on May 12, 2012.
I've always loved to cook, and I love to meet new people. All I had to learn were decorating, housekeeping, PR & marketing, web designing, bookkeeping, scheduling & tourism ... and I became an innkeeper. The cooking & people are the easy part. The rest... let's just say I'm a work in progress!
We have the best guests we could ever hope to meet. We live in absolutely the BEST small town in Ohio. And every time new guests walk through the door, I recall my wonderful husband saying those words...
"I remember you saying you'd like to have a bed and breakfast some day, and I think this might be the house."
Your innkeepers, Jim & Cathy Marker