(Non) Labor Day musings

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Today is Labor Day…and for the first time in three decades, it’s not even a notable day for us. Living as we have done in places for which tourism is a chief industry, Labor Day always marked the supposed (if not actual) End of The Season and everyone in the hospitality industry drew a collective breath of relief. Tomorrow we called Tumbleweed Tuesday (picture the tumbleweed rolling across the deserted Old West street) and pretty much every restaurant in the Hamptons will be closed for the first time in fourteen weeks. In our business, we found that the bookings did not lessen after Labor Day, but an entirely different type of guest arrived: usually from farther away than the Tri-State area, and way more laid back than the summer crowd.

Those of you who’ve (voluntarily!) transitioned into retirement ahead of me, tell me: Do people ask you if you miss your work? I can’t imagine that they do…unless maybe the askers are your old co-workers still in the job, who hope you at least miss them.

But probably because A Butler’s Manor was a very personal business, people ask Chris and me if we miss the bed and breakfast (and if we’re planning on opening another one, hahaha). So it comes as some surprise to me to find that I don’t. At all. Twenty years of hospitality resulted in wonderful memories, new skills, and great friends. Don’t get me wrong: We enjoyed being innkeepers and were, I think I can safely say, very good at it. But I didn’t realize how done I was until we closed the business at the end of last October. I didn’t realize the extent to which I needed my own space that couldn’t be invaded or compromised or interrupted by the phone or a knock or a head poked into my kitchen. I didn’t realize how much I needed not to have to talk.

I’m a nester. I fall hard for houses, spend a lot of time and energy creating the look, feeling, and atmosphere I want, and nearly every living space I’ve ever occupied for longer than a week tends to grow roots in my heart and stay in my dreams long after I’ve moved on. Therefore, I expected that leaving ABM -- where I’d lived longer than any other dwelling (including my childhood home!) -- would be a huge emotional drain. After all, longevity aside, I had curated that space to not only feel like my home but to make guests feel it was their home. Perhaps because they felt is was their home, it became less of mine, and therefore was easier to leave.

So of course, I jumped into nesting the very first day we took possession of the property. To date, I have repainted walls, woodwork, and even a floor in all but three rooms in the house. I enjoy every single day spent working on a project while playing music as loud as I want...or in complete silence. It’s a continual delight to close the door on whatever isn’t finished at the end of the day rather than to hurriedly clear and clean up so that no evidence of upheaval is visible to anyone except us. And what a luxury it is to have the entire day to work on said project rather than the four hours between the end of breakfast and the start of check-in.

Nope, I don’t miss that aspect of running a B&B at all.

However, a few weeks ago when Chris brought in an overabundance of bounty from the garden (wasn't that zucchini only 4” long yesterday?), I pulled down my B&B cookbooks and started baking…and realized that there was something I did miss. Twenty years of being able to try recipes, bake cakes, crumbles, muffins, and scones; create gooey French toast and fruit-filled crepes and apple pancakes to feed ten or twelve people at a time let me satisfy my craving for a portion without having an entire recipe to consume. (The joke was that I spent the first five years of innkeeping putting on fifteen pounds and the next ten taking it off.) It's the baking that is more fun for me, far more than cooking, although I’d like to say I’m a pretty good cook. I just don’t get as excited about dinner as I do about dessert.

If there’s a constant in my dreams of what I might do going forward, it is finding ways to be creative daily. In the years that we ran ABM, in between redecorating a room or setting up a special welcome (for a celebration, say, or a proposal) I got my creative fix via cooking, baking, flower arranging, my breakfast plate presentations, writing the “Chatter from the Manor” blog, and more. My quest now is to find ways to incorporate creativity (and maybe my sweet tooth) into my future.

To begin, I have loads of challenges in updating the house and making it ours. Now facing a fixed budget (!!) and interested in seeing how I can adapt and reuse a lot of what is here, I started by painting a dated brass light fixture brushed nickel and replacing the shades, then painting the glass shade of another fixture to look like art glass. I may replace the fixtures with something else down the line, but in the meantime, I can happily live with these. 

In the meantime, even though summer isn't really over, maybe today I'll start on a wreath for the fall.

Time to redefine what Labor Day means to me!