Opportunity

Inside Tomball’s famed antique store, Nana’s Main St. Cottage

Along the Trinity and Brazos Railroad line, about 30 miles northwest of the heart of Houston, a dark wooden house sits on the side of the road leading into Old Town Tomball — one of the few buildings whose shade holds promise of reprieve from the petulant Texan sun.

I would say blink and you might miss it, were it not for the 12-foot-tall twin metal roosters standing haughtily at the foot of the wraparound porch.

I had driven through Tomball countless times before, dozens of uniform wooden storefronts announcing antiques, custom cowboy boots, railroad memorabilia, and “good ole Texan barbeque” flitting by, but this was a gem of southern kitsch I had to experience. It was those roosters, so ostentatious in their McDonalds yellow-and-red plumage — surrounded by a posse of smaller metal flamingos, cacti, and various barnyard animals — that piqued my interest so much I found myself turning into the driveway without a second thought.

Gravel crunching beneath my feet, I approached the front door. A hand-painted sign with “Nana’s Main Street Cottage 314 Main St.” crowded on it hung on a faded white signpost pointing towards the home. The shiplap walls and green-trimmed windows were bursting with eclectic antiques and collectibles, just as promised in large oxidized block letters above the entrance.

“It’s a hundred years old, you know. Hundred percent cedar too.”

Honeyed but cracking in places, a voice much like the building in front of me emerged from a waist-high gate to the side of the house that I hadn’t noticed earlier.

“Come on in this way,” she waved me over, “I’m Nana. Would you like some lemonade while you take a look aroun’?”

Dressed in rolled-up, faded jeans and a t-shirt, her hair coiled into a low bun, “Nana” looked nothing like what I imagined; the few streaks of silver in her hair and sun-speckled wrinkles on her hands seemed like the only signs giving some semblance of truth to her name. After ushering me into the yard behind her shop however, handing me a mason jar with homemade lemonade some minutes later, the way she shared the news of her granddaughter, Caitlyn,”gettin’ into that nursin’ school down the road” and her grandson, Logan, who’s “always tinkerin’ aroun’ out back, makin’ somethin’ or other,” I felt the name more fitting.

While Nana chattered on in her charming lilt, dropping gs left and right, I looked around and realized that the giant roosters were only the tip of the metal-art iceberg. The yard was a maze of figures big and small-cockatoos, giraffes, trucks, sunflowers, lizards, cows, crawfish, bluebonnets, and, of course, lots and lots of roosters-all congregated, perched on rocks, benches, in the shade of trees, and on the ground, as if waiting for a conference to start.

In the middle of the yard was a small red barn, picket-fence posts decorating the exterior, with various brassy barn-animals clustered around its perimeter. Inside the barn, exposed wires hung draped from the beams above, while paint-cans, tattered work gloves, hay bales, wooden parts, and various tools lay in disarray below.

“That’s my grandson’s workshop.” A man who identified himself as Dan Howes, or “Pops,” emerged from behind the barn. “He also built that pen over there-you say hi to the goats yet?”

I had not. I had been so preoccupied with the curious inanimate animals around me I had completely failed to notice the real live animals only a few metres away, and only just discerned the quiet chorus of bleating beneath the whirring sound of a circular saw and Luke Bryan playing in the background.

Pops’ accent was different from Nana’s. It was a little like grits — his s’s mushy and soft, his o’s scooped, like a bowl of diphthongs. As he led me over to the enclosure, he explained that his accent was from “around here,” though he grew up in Cypress about half an hour away, while his wife was from Louisiana and “evidently had a thicker Cajun accent on account of that.”

Although Pops met Nana at a college party in Louisiana (“She was the prettiest one there and the rest, like they say, is history”), the two have since lived around Tomball for 44 years, where they’ve watched their kids and grandkids grow up and settle down nearby.

The store, Pops told me, was not so much part of the plan, but a “happy accident” that has allowed his growing family to pitch in and work on a business together.

Despite the name associated with the place, Nana was the last one to find out about the store.

“I was jus’ drivin’ down Main Street here and saw the buildin’ was for sale and thought it ought to be a good idea to buy it. So I did.”

Although he wasn’t sure initially what to do with the historic home, his daughter had been selling some remodeled furniture at the time, so he decided to move her business into the house and name it Nana’s Main Street Cottage. When they finally brought Nana over to see it, “she cried for months,” Pops recalled, chuckling at his wife’s initial trepidation.

As for how they started selling the yard-art outside the shop, Pops shrugged, “Again, just kind of went into that accidentally too, uh by accident so to speak.”

Then, mulling it over, he changed his mind. “No, you know what, not an accident — an opportunity. That’s what that was.”

Smiling, pleased at his salesmanship, he explained that the yard-art was a way to make the otherwise nondescript wooden home stand out to passerby.

They had started with a three-foot rooster, then replaced it with its seven-foot twin, until finally erecting the 12-feet of cockerel that had so successfully wrangled me into the shop. The roosters were such a hit that Nana and Pops “just kinda kept goin’,” he said, gesturing at the creatures around us.

What about them? I asked, pointing to the three undeniably adorable baby goats nibbling at my fingers through the fence in front of me.

Pops crossed his weathered arms over his stained Sherwin-Williams t-shirt.

“Well, Nana, once she stopped crying — took six months, she was scared to death — once she stopped crying, she wanted the store to be more family-friendly. So that’s when Logan built the pond back here,” he cocked his head towards the koi fish swimming in lazy circles nearby, “to have little kids feed the fish.”

His granddaughter, who is in FFA (Future Farmers of America) raised a show goat and “took such a likin’ to raisin’ ‘em” that she prepared a whole PowerPoint presentation on why adopting three of them would attract even more families and more business.

“So that’s how we got to havin’ these little pygmy goats-Ramsey, Hershey, and Casper the Friendly Goat,” he pointed to one with tan blotches, another a rich chocolate brown, and the last, entirely white.

“They’re actually real famous,” he told me, “If you Google up ‘Tomball goats’ you’ll see.”

While I was disappointed that I wasn’t the first one to discover the quaint mom-and-pop shop, I pressed him for details on his kids’ fame.

Pops’ voice dropped to a furtive whisper; wagging an incriminating thumb to the left, he told me that a few months ago “the Wicked Witch of the West” in the neighbouring house “didn’t like the goats, so she took down the fence, cut off half the shed, sprayed them with metal, and the sawdust-wood that was probably 20 or 25 years old-had arsenic in it.”

Casper’s mother, Nessie, got sick and had to be put down.

Pops wrung his hands and shook his head, saying “That stuff’s uncalled for, you know, it really is.”

The three pygmy goats’ ordeal was not over, however.

The neighbour soon filed a complaint to the City Council, citing a violation of a Tomball ordinance that banned all livestock animals within 100 feet of a residence, with the exception of four potbellied pigs weighing less than 200 pounds.

To Nana and Pops, having “800 pounds of pig but not being allowed eight pounds of goat” seemed unreasonable.

With the help of a social media campaign through the hashtag #tomballgoatsupporter, fifteen letters of support from the community, 200 signatures, and a vehement call for justice from a local instructor who teaches Goat Yoga (it’s exactly what it sounds like: yoga, with goats climbing on your back), Nana’s three kids were allowed to stay and the ordinance was changed to specifically include four pygmy goats in the exception.

Beyond the interesting story, I was particularly intrigued by the goat yoga — something I had never heard of before.

Seeing my incredulity, Pops chuckled conspiratorially with Nana and, his face lighting up, he ushered me once more, this time, inside the enclosure.

I looked at the goats and then down at my outfit.

It was the wrong day to wear all white.

Nonetheless, following his instructions, I perched next to a wooden ledge, bending over 90 degrees, and told him I thought I could only handle one goat on my back (they might be miniature, but they seemed heavy).

With an explosive chortle from Pops, a huge weight suddenly settled on top of me; what felt like dozens of hooves tap-danced precariously between my shoulder blades.

“It’s just one goat don’t worry,” Pops assured me, “You’ll see when you take a look at the picture.”

The picture he took confirmed that, in fact, it was two.

When I asked him how he discovered that his pygmy goats were capable of such a rambunctious balancing act, he told me that the cameraman of “one of the news guys” that came to cover the famous goats after the ordinance changed bent down near the ledge one day and Ramsey, “the show-off,” jumped on top.

After that Pops thought it would be a great attraction to make the shop even more family-friendly and memorable so he taught Hershey to do the same trick.

Leaning against the pen, lost in thought for a moment, he said in a comfortable drawl,

“Well gosh, I guess that kinda started by accident too — ” wagging his finger emphatically, “ — or no, no, sorry, opportunity. Opportunity.”

He turned, smiling a crinkled smile, to look at Nana; she just chuckled at her husband and shook her head, as if in on a joke she didn’t understand.

I think Pops found his new business slogan.

Originally published at http://reginalan.me on June 26, 2019.