Lorraine: We met at a bar. It was country western night, and he looked like a fun guy—always had a big smile in the middle of the crowd. My mom said, “There’s one for you.” I was like, “He’s not my type.” But then I asked him to dance.

Bill: It’s all your fault. From that point on, we saw each other at the bar every week. Just dancing and talking.

Lorraine: Then we found out we worked across the street from each other. He started picking me up for lunch, and we’d drive around and talk.

Bill: For our first official date, we went to the aquarium and took her three-year-old son. If I was getting to know her, I was getting to know her son.

Lorraine: So sweet. We married in ’95 and had four more kids. Childcare was so expensive that I stopped working and stayed home with them. I was home for more than twenty years.

I’d always enjoyed baking, and when the kids were growing up, we’d make and decorate Christmas cookies. Then I started seeing these beautifully decorated cookies on magazine covers and thought, I want to try that. I was terrible at first. I had no idea what I was doing. But I was hooked.

By 2014, I was sharing my cookies on Instagram. An event planner I followed in Montgomery, Alabama, messaged me and asked if I could ship cookies. I’d never done it before, but I was willing to learn. He kept ordering. The orders got bigger and more complex. Then he asked me to make cookies for the governor’s Christmas tour of the mansion. So we drove them down ourselves.

Bill: We didn’t know anything about Alabama except a page in the history books. Our first experience in Montgomery was pulling up to the guard shack at the governor’s mansion—and they let us in.

Lorraine: It was wild standing there in the mansion.

Bill: That week, we met some of Lorraine’s cookie customers, and they invited us to Thanksgiving. We couldn’t show up empty-handed, so I made two pumpkin pies in the mini-kitchen in our motel room: homemade crust, hand-whipped cream, everything. My mom baked, and I always liked being in the kitchen with her. I learned from her.

Lorraine: We came back to Montgomery the next summer for the event planner’s 25th birthday and met all these creatives and entrepreneurs. Everybody kept asking, “Why are you here?”

Bill: Because who vacations in Montgomery?

Lorraine: We told them our crazy story, and they were so welcoming. We started thinking: maybe moving to Montgomery would be good for our family. Our kids are creative, and there weren’t many opportunities for them where we lived in South Jersey. We decided to move.

It took five years to sell our house. Our listing was about to run out, and I finally said, “All right, God, if Montgomery isn’t the plan, then show me what is. I’m taking my hands off.”

Two weeks after the listing ended, a realtor called. Someone wanted to see our house. We sold it ourselves. Just like that. After five years.

Bill: I settled Lorraine and the kids in Montgomery in March 2019, then went back to New Jersey to work. I didn’t know when I’d find a job here or when I could come back.

Lorraine: I got my cottage food license and had my first order that May.

Then COVID came. We switched to front-porch pickups—no contact. People kept ordering, and I started making decorate-your-own cookie kits. I worked at the dining room table every day, waving to customers through the window.

Bill: I worked from home during COVID, so I started doing the baking for her. Baking is still my job. I work here full time now.

Lorraine: Eventually, we started looking for a retail space. This place on Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery was empty, but we didn’t think being on Dexter Avenue was attainable. We couldn’t get a loan, so we scaled everything back and did it with what I’d saved from being a home baker.

We moved in on June 1, 2023, and opened three months later. Most of what’s here came from a thrift store, Facebook Marketplace, or the side of the road.

Bill: From the beginning, we wanted this to be a place where people could gather and meet each other. Everybody is accepted here—whether you’re homeless or an executive.

We have military families celebrating graduations. There’s even a military wives’ knitting group that meets here.

Lorraine: Some of the unhoused people who come in call us “Mama” and “Papa,” which is sweet.

Bill: People can put money on a gift card for somebody else. So when someone comes in and doesn’t have the money, we use that card to take care of them.

Lorraine: We heard Joan Mulholland speak about participating in the civil rights movement and sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. She talked about how, even as protesters were pulled from their seats and attacked, they kept returning to the counter because that’s where they were holding steady. That stayed with us. The counter in our store is a little nod to that history.

There wasn’t much diversity where we lived in South Jersey. Here, life has never been more beautiful. And this is growing.

Bill: What we’re building isn’t really about cookies.

Lorraine: It’s about the people who are celebrated with them. This is a bakery, but it’s also about what people feel when they walk through the door. We want this to feel like home.

Bill: She’s good at being the visionary. And I’m—

Lorraine: He’s the getter-doner.

Bill: We complement each other really well.

Lorraine: I went from being a stay-at-home mom for more than twenty years in New Jersey to owning a bakery on Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, Alabama. I learned I’ve still got it.

I can do hard things.