You’re a peaceful person. So easygoing and chill, people have told you since you were a kid. Maybe you even grew up to write a newsletter rooted in gratitude and optimism.
But now it’s 8:15 this past Thursday morning, and you’re late to daycare dropoff for your youngest kid, which’ll certainly make you even later to your other kid’s summer camp — Wait, where even is camp this week? Basketball at the church, or soccer at the college, or flame-throwing in a field? Look, I just need an address. — and being late to both of those will no doubt make you tardy for a meeting, and here you are stuck behind 20 hot cars in a single-file line on Caswell Road by the hospital, just shimmering on hot pavement, waiting for a light to turn green, whenever SOMETHING CAN JUST GO YOUR WAY.
“Mustard!” your 3-year-old says from the backseat.
You look to your left and see a yellow fire hydrant and smile. Good kid.
“Mustard!” he says again, because you didn’t explicitly acknowledge him the first time.
“Yeah, that’s right. Good job, buddy,” you say.
Then you look left again and see a car creeping up beside you. And where the hell are YOU going? you think.
You look closer and it’s a former coworker, a wonderful soul, actually. She has two hands on the wheel and, before you can roll down your window and holler hello, she zooms forward in a lane that doesn’t exist. She realizes her mistake and jerks back into the single-file line, which of course causes the car behind her to blast its horn, which reminds you that if you’re ever in charge of anything you’ll put a tax on angry car horn usage. Wanna honk? Go for it, pal; that’s a penny in our sidewalk fund.
Your morning reading didn’t help matters. The cease-fire in Iran’s off. Maine’s Senate race is gross. And closer to home, violent storms caused the roof to collapse at, of all places, Roof Above. You tried to read a good piece of writing to center yourself, but the one you chose this morning was an essay about how people aren’t reading anymore, and you read every word of that.
The energy’s off. The chill is gone. Even you aren’t immune to becoming the temporary sum of the world’s negative inputs. So you drop the kids, have that meeting, and drive straight over to The Pauline Tea-bar.
Have y’all been there?
***
The sign on the door says “No WiFi.” The air smells of lemon ginger and raspberry green and elderberry. A square tabletop sand box inside comes with miniature rakes and hoes and shovels, and if you dig an inch you might hit a rock that reads “PEACE.”
Located near the intersection of Morehead and Wilkinson, The Pauline is a bubble — a sanctuary in this feverish city, a tea shop that barely breaks even in a commercialist town filled with coffee shops built to scale, a place where people come for work meetings without laptops.
Owner and founder Sherry Waters is decorating the place for its seventh-anniversary celebration. She smiles and welcomes you in a way that lets you know she probably hasn’t honked a horn in 30 years. You feel like you again.
So I ask how she built a place that does … that.
“I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, and I didn’t know anything about the business of running a cafe,” she says. “But I knew what I wanted people to feel like.”
What’s that? I ask.
“For people to walk in and go, ‘I needed this,’” she says.
Mission accomplished. We sit. She takes the couch against the longer wall, and I take a chair next to her. All around us are works from seven different local artists, whose pieces she’s displaying throughout the seven-year anniversary celebration. She rarely finds herself on this couch. She’s usually at the back table or in her back office, providing grief counseling or spiritual counseling, or filling in as the hospitality hostess.
I start asking about her business — very Charlotte questions like what’s the business model? — and she tells me that Pauline’s doesn’t actually bring in a salary for her. She pays a living wage to her hospitality hosts, who are trained in herbalism and holistic medicine, and pays the rent and there’s not much left over for her. Sherry makes her income from other related ventures, including a consulting service for nonprofits, personal coaching, and spiritual companionship, much of which she does out of that back office.
Anyway, as I’m asking her all of these boring LinkedIn questions, she stops and looks away.
“I need to sit on this couch more often,” she says. “This is a wide lens of this place, and it’s like I’m seeing this place for the first time myself today.”
Her eyes start to well up.
What do you see? I ask.
“A cared-for, cared-for cafe,” she says. “It feels like an open living room. It does feel like Grandma’s house.”
***
Sherry grew up in Asheville, the oldest of five children. Her grandparents lived near Lake Lure and were farmers. Her grandmother, Pauline, also taught Sunday school and elementary school. Whenever Sherry visited, Pauline made her two things — cornflakes and tea. Sherry remembers picking out her own cup from the cabinet.
“She would make me that cup of tea,” Sherry says now, “and I felt like I was the most beloved grandchild.”
Sherry went from Asheville to UNC Chapel Hill, and later got a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke.
She moved to Charlotte in 1992 to become a TV reporter. She started with a nine-month apprenticeship at WSOC, then moved over to become a weekend reporter at WBTV for a year. She hated the job, and quickly turned her career toward community building and nonprofit development.
In 2016, she completed a residency with Carolinas HealthCare System as a chaplain, and she started to think about ways she could use her skills to help more people. She was the development director for the Harvest Center when, in 2019, she happened to drive past the one-story brick building off of Morehead and Wilkinson in west Charlotte. That morning, the property owner had put up a “For Lease” sign.
She calls what followed a “God Wink.”
She stopped and pressed her face against the window, then was startled by a man who said, “Can I help you with something?” She told him she was just curious about what the building looked like inside. She looked closer at his name badge, and she’d actually met the man two days earlier. He was a donor to the Harvest Center.
He showed her around and let her stay inside by herself. She didn’t close her eyes and envision how it would look or anything mawkish like that. Instead she just thought about what she wanted it to feel like.
She went home and told her husband she wanted to leave her job. She talked to her daughter, then just 14 years old, about the feeling she wanted to create. Her daughter started creating a vision board. The girl came up with the branding and the logo. She even came up with what’s undoubtedly Pauline’s most important detail:
***
You pick your own cup.
On the wall beside the checkout counter are rows of gently used coffee cups, which she’s gathered through the years from friends and antique shops. They’re all different colors, mismatched and random. Kind of like a Grandma’s cabinet. My favorite is a vintage Morton Salt cup.
The shop has six different types of tea, with variations of each. When you order, the hospitality hostess asks if you’d like honey, then invites you to pick out your cup. Then she matches that cup with a teapot, which she’ll bring to you. That was all Sherry’s daughter’s idea, built on that “feeling.”
“If I get too woo-woo on you, let me know,” Sherry tells me, as if it’s necessary to apologize, as if I hadn’t come here explicitly for the woo-woo counterpoint to this go-go city.
“But it’s the communion factor. A person choosing their teacup and then having our hospitality hostess pair the pot that they think would go with the cup — it’s a way of connectedness,” she says. “It’s a way of just saying, ‘I’m with you; I see you.’”
***
One last God Wink.
That building Sherry stopped for, the one she wound up renting to create her sanctuary of tea and other things, sits on Arty Avenue. That’s short for artillery.
Her lease runs out in December 2027, and she’s almost certain the property owner will want to turn the site into apartments. She doesn’t blame them. High-rises have sprouted up all around her in the seven years she’s been open. She’s also, you might guess, not stressing about it. God will wink again, she believes.
Anyhow, back to Arty Avenue: A century ago, this area of Charlotte, Camp Greene, was a World War I training facility. It housed 60,000 or so Army soldiers, who stayed here and had a hospital here, while taking day trips to the Catawba River to train at the artillery range and airfield.
She likes that history. In her seven years as owner of The Pauline, she’s hosted funerals and weddings, baby and bridal showers. A few weeks ago she held a tea-tasting for a woman’s 40th birthday outing, and the woman’s friends asked if they ever had to leave.
And so goes the story of Charlotte. An Army artillery site becomes a medical facility becomes a rare house of peace that people don’t want to leave.
As Sherry puts it, “We’re repurposing this place to do something very different than arming up and getting ready for battle.”
You put your teacup and dishes in the bin when you’re done, take a few more rakes in the sandbox, then walk back out into the hot summer morning, the sounds of busy people driving on busy roads all around you, and you wonder:
Have they ever stopped here?