Adam Oster, Novelist

As we near the moment in which my wife and I take over ownership of a cute little café/bakery (which, assuming all goes well, should have happened a few hours before this post hits the site), I can’t help but feel a little sentimental. While I’m not the kind of guy who should be owning a café or a bakery, since my knowledge of coffee ends at black Americano, and my knowledge of baking got me as far as that one time I made cookies over a decade ago, I can’t help but recognize how everything in my relationship with my wife has really led to this.

You see, when I first met my wife, she was working in a little coffee shop in the mall. I’ve long joked about how half the reason I ended up wanting to date her is because of how much free coffee she would get me. She introduced me to the trendy coffee shop in town as well, a place where all the young kids who were still too young to drink alcohol would hang out. Not long after that, she started working at a bakery, where she quickly rose to prominence as the kitchen manager, taking over most of the activities in there while the owner, well, didn’t exactly do a good job of owning the business.

In those few short early years with my now-wife, it felt as though I had far more coffee and baked goods than I had ever had in my prior twenty years on this planet.

And it was already back then when she started talking about wanting to open up her own bakery.

For the past twenty years, it’s felt as though everything we’ve done has been to get that bakery. And the very second we finally were able to scrape together enough cash to get there, a place posted to their social media accounts that they were looking for someone to buy them out.

In this magic moment of kismet, after years of scheming and looking at buildings and trying to come up with a way in which my wife’s baking could finally have a place of prominence, nearly twenty years after I first met that coffee-shop girl, we’ve got it.

I can’t speak for my wife, but in my mind, this is the moment in which she finally achieves her ultimate self. Where she can finally be who she truly is, and show the world (or at least the Chippewa Valley) of what she is capable. And the fact that this happened within months of me having a truly revelational moment regarding my writing and the stage makes me think that maybe, just maybe, 2022 will finally be the year where these two Osters actually finally feel like they’re on the path they’ve wanted to be on since they first met.

And that makes me more than a little sentimental. It makes me think back to that coffee shop girl and that young unformed creative first meeting at the theatre and realizing they were kindred spirits. We’re just a lot older now…