When we adopted Sara from Honduras, I had no idea I was getting an entrepreneur. But I did know that she would be a fanatic animal lover.
Her brothers and sisters were chickens, and she also loved dogs, cats and birds. In our first outing with her in 190, she became enthralled with a parrot in a cage as we ate at a Tegucigalpa restaurant. Sit down and eat, Sara!
Arriving at our home in Arlington, VA., she immediately struck up a friendship with our dalmatian, Brandy. Her fondness for animals presented a problem with me: I have never been keen on pets, and I was allergic to many of them.
She found a stray dog as she came out of the movies near our summer home in South Boston. When we couldn’t find an owner, she talked us into taking it to Arlington with us. I sneezed much of the way. I didn’t know her as a forceful little girl, but she leveraged all of her contacts at school to find a home for the animal.
For her school’s career day, she followed a veterinarian and was fascinated by her work. She was hired as a kennel assistant. But Sara preferred becoming a veterinary technician, “because there is more hands-on work,” she says.
Meanwhile, there was an endless stream of disgusting little creatures at our house: gerbils, hamsters, Guinea pigs and rabbits. Yuck! There were some of her beloved chickens, hatched at Pickett’s preschool and on their way to permanent homes near South Boston.
One dog at our house wasn’t enough so Sara drove 350 miles to get a poodle on a whim. Owners of another poodle in the litter took him to Sara’s wedding years later!
I thought I was free of this menagerie when Sara moved out in her early 20s, but she lived in the house next door to us 10 years later in South Boston when her husband Lance’s job was upended in Georgia.
Of course there were four or five barking beasts next door. Was that enough? No, Sara decided to invite strangers with their dogs to her house so she could groom them. Up and down our lane in cars all day—yap, yap, yap! Doggie hell. We even got her to buy new gravel for the worn-down road.
But hey, she was making money doing this! She got to be pretty good. She loved it and it showed. Customers adored her! She posted photos of each grooming on Facebook. She would get thank-you notes so many times. She even hired helpers.
Finally, it was time to move to Christiansbutg (near Blacksburg), where Lance had landed a good job. It turns out that grooming was in just as much demand there. Sara, now 34, has opened a business, called Solo Paws, and has four or five employees and more than 500 regular customers! They love her work too! Some have even driven the 126 miles from South Boston.
Well, she didn’t get any of these skills from me. But I am so proud of her!
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