From The Innkeepers

On Keeping It Local, Simple, and Human

After a slow start to summer, August has us hitting the ground running, with a retreat currently in progress and three more on the way this month. It feels good to be getting back into the swing of things. The beauty of starting back up mid-summer is that the bounty of the season is just beginning. With our first group in mid-July, we stocked up on local Amish veggies for salads and sides, and blueberries for cobbler. We’ve added fresh herbs from our own garden to the menu, and soon we’ll have more zucchini and tomatoes than we know what to do with. Most exciting for me, my flower garden is finally bursting with blooms, and I’m finally realizing my dream of cutting fresh flowers from the garden for bouquets around the inn.

This feels so gratifying because, since we took over in September, we’ve tried to follow in our aunts’ footsteps of keeping it as local as we can around here. They always prided themselves on serving food that was grown in this community. This spring, we gladly accepted vegetable and flower seedlings from our neighbor Annie, along with fresh asparagus grown on her farm. Once the nearby Amish farm stands opened, we loaded up with enough strawberries for shortcake and a huge batch of house-made jam. Last month, when everyone in Michigan was afraid to eat factory-farmed lettuce after an outbreak of a parasitic foodborne illness, we were grateful we could serve locally grown lettuce in our salads. There’s a certain satisfaction in sharing food grown in your own yard or your community; not only is it fresher, but there’s a comfort in knowing where it came from, because you visited the farm and met the people who grew it.

Sharing local food with our guests is one of our favorite things to do. Ironically, very few of our customers live nearby, so even though the food is not local to them, the privilege is in sharing the best of our community with people who are visiting. It reminds me of the phenomenon of Josh and Jase. If you aren’t familiar with them, they’re two young guys from the UK who became a viral internet sensation in Michigan in January, spending three weeks touring the state in the dead of winter, marveling at things they’d never experienced back home: sub-zero temperatures, snowmobiling around Mackinac Island, and the medicinal properties of an ice-cold Vernors, to name a few. They traveled up the west coast of the state all the way to the Upper Peninsula, stopping at small businesses and highlighting the friendliness, hospitality, and generosity of Michiganders. One of the nicest parts of following their journey was how they brought people together in a collective pride for our state. The comments under each of their videos featured hundreds of people inviting them to their own hometown and telling them about local hidden gems and beloved businesses they need to check out. 

The reason they came to mind is that they just returned. One of the most popular sentiments people expressed to them this winter was “If you think Michigan is great in the winter, you have to come back and experience a Michigan summer.” Well, they just landed in Detroit earlier this week. One of their first stops was Ann Arbor, where they immediately caused a bunch of flatlanders from Ohio to rage out in the comments because they visited the Big House, which they endearingly accidentally called “the Big Home” in a caption. They then went on to marvel at the girth of the Ypsilanti water tower. (IYKYK) For Michiganders who follow them, there is a palpable sense of excitement about what great parts of our state they will experience this summer. It’s the same type of pride we get in sharing the best of our area with our customers, and for Josh and Jase, there’s the reciprocal excitement in discovering the best things a new place has to offer. 

Since moving here, Aaron and I have set out on a similar mission as Josh and Jase, only our radius is about a half hour outside of Big Rapids, and the only lives we are influencing are our own. Finding local small business gems has become one of our favorite pastimes, not only for sourcing food and supplies for the inn, but as part of the work of starting over in a new town. Within the first few months we’d found A La Mode and Schuberg’s, a breakfast diner and a downtown bar and grill that fill the exact spaces our old neighborhood favorites in Ann Arbor, the Northside Diner and Casey’s Tavern. We also discovered Red Fox Market, the Old Pioneer Store and Emporium, and Belle’s Coffeehouse, the kind of unique, independent spots that make a town start to feel like home.

One of our favorite finds has been Peaceful Valley Farms, a local lavender farm we recently visited on a date night for an event called An Evening in Bloom. We had visited their farm store for a craft sale back in December, but at that time, the landscape was covered in snow. We came back on a sunny, cool evening in June to lush rolling hills and long rows of lavender in bloom, an acoustic duo playing mellow covers, local artisan vendors, and a food truck that served crab-topped truffle fries!? We ended the night with a dish of lavender white chocolate ice cream, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but is somehow absolutely delicious. Sitting there on this perfect summer night, watching a hillside full of local people enjoying the fruits of their neighbors’ creativity and hard work made me feel so happy to be a part of this community. 

That evening left us wondering how many other secret magical farms might be hidden around here, and it didn’t take long for us to find another one. A couple weeks later, we attended Artstock, a fundraiser for Artworks, a local nonprofit that promotes arts and humanities programming in town. (They also host Novel Tea, the monthly book club I joined last fall in my first attempt to meet some likeminded people here.) This fundraiser was held on a different farm owned by a beloved local business owner. This farm was just as breathtaking and featured a beautiful strawbale garden. The event included a day of musical performances with the open barn as the stage and grilled food and drinks served by the local brewery in town. It was another wonderful event supported by local business owners to gather people together, this time in support of the arts.

As new business owners, trying to figure out who we want to be, these types of ventures are inspiring. One thing we know for sure is that we want to stay true to ourselves and the vibe of our rural, small town. When guests come to visit us, we want them to experience not only what our property has to offer, but what our entire community has to offer. 

We also want to keep our business as simple and human as possible. While we have made a few changes to our aunts’ business practices (we now have social media accounts and accept credit cards) we take inspiration from the fact that they kept it small and simple for more than 20 years before we took over. And we aren’t the only businesses around town doing it that way. Many Amish farms run their stands with a self-serve checkout, using a spiral notebook, a cash box, and the honor system. My absolutely amazing yoga teacher, who owns Heart and Sole Yoga in town, keeps track of your class package use on an index card with hash marks. New Horizons, the landscape company we bought compost from in the spring, has a rewards system where they give you wooden coins to trade in for a later credit. This is the kind of simplicity that I absolutely love. I felt delighted to trade my wooden coins for a brand new echinacea plant a few weeks later. 

A couple weeks ago we hosted dinner for a few new friends we have made since moving here. One of our friends who is a consultant in the hospitality industry shared a fantastic deal for a website redesign and online booking package he discovered while working with an inn out east (that is far more “big time” than us). He seemed surprised when I told him I don’t ever want our website to offer online booking. It may seem terribly old fashioned, but I explained that I want to communicate with our customers personally when they book a stay with us. If we can have an exchange by email or over the phone, we begin to get to know each other before they arrive. I get to learn a little about them and what their needs are for their stay, and they get a sense of who we are. It’s important to me to start creating relationships with customers before they get here. A small group retreat is a temporary community, and I want everyone to feel comfortable and happy while we are here together, and a sense of community can only be built through human interaction. 

If I can meet you through a real conversation in writing or over the phone and find out how we can make your stay as comfortable as possible, and then we can share with you the best of what we and our community have to offer, then it is more than just a business transaction. It’s human connection. More and more, this is the type of business we want to support and the type of business we aim to create ourselves. In this world that is more digital and impersonal by the day, keeping it local, simple, and human is practically an act of revolution.