RUMFORD — At the beginning of 2015, Peggy Park’s patience paid off.

After dreaming of owning and operating a business on Congress Street in downtown Rumford for most of her life, Park, who now lives in Orwell, Vt., was able to take advantage of an empty business space in 2014 and turn it into a store she could call her own: Home Again Girls.

Park’s store features homemade, found and donated trinkets displayed throughout the building, along with many pieces of artwork hanging on the wall and re-purposed furniture that Park and others created.

Three days a week, Park makes the four-and-a-half-hour trek from Orwell to Rumford.

However, with 2016 around the corner and her lease for the building due to run out in March, Park said she may have to hand over the reins to someone else.

After a year of being open, Park said her doctor told her the constant driving is taking a toll on her health; he recommended she take a break from the driving.

Park said that whenever she feels tired or stressed during the commute she pulls over to the side of the road and does deep breathing.

“My daughter-in-law teaches yoga, and I’ve found that the deep breathing she told me about helps me meditate and calms me down when I feel overwhelmed,” Park said. 

When Park was a child and working as a clerk at her father’s grocery store in Rumford, she said she “had retail in her blood” and “had a dream to someday own a business on Congress Street in Rumford.”

“I loved walking down Congress Street and seeing the different businesses there,” Park said in January 2015, shortly before her shop opened. “It became my goal to open up a store on Congress Street.”

However, years passed and Park grew farther away from her retail roots. She moved to Florida for a year when she was 17, then moved back to Maine to take classes at the University of Maine.

Park held a number of positions throughout her career, including social worker and geriatric specialist, before retiring and moving to Orwell, Vt. But she would occasionally visit Rumford for reunions or to see musical performances.

“Whenever I came here, I would walk up Congress Street and would get very sad,” Park said. “It just wasn’t the same as it used to be.”

When a building came up for rent on Congress Street in 2014, Park decided to make her move. The name of the store was a reference to Park returning to her hometown years after moving away, and the help she received from friends in Rumford.

In the 10 months since Home Again Girls opened, Park said she and other residents have introduced several different craft classes ranging from instructions on how to make your own Christmas ornaments to how to re-purpose certain pieces of furniture.

“I think that the groundwork has been laid for the store at this point,” Park said. “There’s a foundation there. Now, if somebody ends up taking the store over in March, they’ll have a place to start.”

She added that she would keep all of the store’s inventory in the building so the next person who takes over can try and sell it.

“I want to leave the inventory here because it’s extremely important to me that the store stay in downtown Rumford,” Park said. “I could’ve done something in Portland, or Burlington, or even Boston, but I wanted it to be here.”

For Park, it was just as important to make customers feel comfortable at Home Again Girls as it was to attract customers to the store.

“My door is always open,” she said. “If people come here and just want to look around, that’s fine. If they come and and just need a place to sit, that’s also fine. I feel very strongly that we have to make people comfortable. They don’t have to come in and buy if they don’t want to.”

In February, before her store had officially opened, Park said Home Again Girls wasn’t about the money. Instead, she was hoping to revitalize downtown Rumford again and give people a reason to shop there.

As Park approaches the one-year anniversary of her store opening, she said she still feels that way, and believes her stint as owner and operator “was better than I could have imagined.”

“I may not have made that much money, but it’s been a blessing,” Park said. “My husband said, ‘If I had known this was going to make you that happy, I would have suggested that you did this years ago.’”

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