Joel Leonard: Rich in All the Ways That Matter

Rich in All the Ways That Matter

How a childhood shaped by family, factory workers, friendship and community led one woman to build spaces where others could belong

There are different ways to measure wealth.

For some, it is the amount of money in the bank or the things a family can afford. But growing up as the oldest of three daughters raised by a single mother, I learned another definition.

We were poor. There is no reason to pretend otherwise. But my mother made sure we understood that not having money didn't mean we didn't have anything.

We had each other.

We had our extended family, our cousins and people who showed up when they were needed. We had women in our lives who worked incredibly hard, many of them putting in long hours at the local mills and factories to provide for their families.

Looking back, I think some of the poorest people I've ever known were also some of the richest in love.

I learned that lesson early.

Everybody Became a Candy Bar

I probably wasn't the kid people looked at and thought, She's going to go far.

But I became the first person in my family to graduate from high school. Later, I would become the first to attend college.

For a long time, I thought I wanted to become a journalist. Then, while I was still in high school, an opportunity came along that changed the direction of my life: a foreign exchange trip to Germany.

There was just one problem.

We couldn't afford it.

So I sold candy bars.

A lot of candy bars.

In fact, practically everyone at my mother's factory became a candy bar.

Those factory workers—people who were working hard for every dollar they earned—bought candy bars and helped a girl they knew have an experience her family couldn't otherwise have afforded.

That has stayed with me.

Sometimes the people who have the least are the ones most willing to give.

The trip to Germany was incredible. I came home having seen a much bigger world than the one I had known growing up.

And I came home knowing something else.

I didn't want to be a journalist anymore.

The problem was, I didn't know what I did want to be.

So for three months, I went to work in the same kind of factory where my mother had worked.

Three months was enough.

I knew that wasn't the life I wanted for myself.

Finding Another Way

I had actually been accepted to Campbell University after high school and had even received a scholarship. But a scholarship doesn't necessarily cover everything, and the reality was simple: my family couldn't afford for me to go.

So I turned it down.

At the time, that could have felt like the end of a dream. Instead, community college became the beginning of a different one.

It allowed me to stay close to my family while I figured out who I was and what I wanted. Eventually, I transferred to UNC Wilmington. Life took another turn when I met the man who would become my husband. He was stationed at Fort Bragg, and I ultimately graduated from UNC Pembroke in 2002 with a degree in social work.

By then, I had figured out at least one thing about myself.

I wanted to help people.

The idea that people are stronger when they come together wasn't something I had learned from a textbook. I had watched it my entire life.

Social work seemed like a natural extension of that.

Through AmeriCorps, I became a volunteer coordinator with United Way. I connected people who wanted to help with agencies that desperately needed them.

It may have been one of the jobs I was made to do.

There was something incredibly fulfilling about watching people discover that they had something to contribute—and then helping them find a place where that contribution mattered.

During my senior year of college, my daughter was born.

Suddenly, life wasn't just about figuring out who I wanted to become. I was someone's mother.

And before long, life would take me farther away from everything familiar than I had ever expected.

Building a Family 2,500 Miles From Home

After my husband left the military, he was hired by the Department of Defense, and our young family moved to San Diego.

To many people, moving to San Diego sounds like winning the lottery: sunshine, beaches and beautiful weather.

And yes, San Diego had all of those things.

But it also meant leaving behind the thing that had always made me feel safest—my family.

I arrived on the other side of the country with my husband and a newborn daughter, without the network of people I had always known would be there.

So I learned to build one.

I found a group of mothers, including Beth and Cheryl Lynn, who became some of my closest friends. Without them, I don't know how I would have made it through those years so far from home.

We became our own kind of family.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we couldn't simply get together and be moms.

We started trying to help people.

We weren't an official nonprofit. We were simply a bunch of mothers who saw needs and believed we could do something about them. We organized fundraisers and disaster-relief efforts. Over the years, I estimate our efforts raised somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000.

It wasn't about titles or recognition.

There was work that needed doing, so we did it.

When my daughter became old enough, I started a Girl Scout troop. Beth, Cheryl Lynn and other mothers joined us, and another community grew around us.

My son had arrived in 2004, and he became—and remains—completely a mama's boy.

Eventually, our family moved north to Temecula because we wanted to own a home, something the San Diego housing market made difficult for us. Even after moving roughly 77 miles away, we continued making the drive back for Girl Scouts, sometimes spending two hours on the road.

Community was worth the drive.

Then came a phone call that changed everything.

4:54 A.M.

On May 23, 2012, at 4:54 in the morning, my husband called.

He was gasping for air.

He had been in an accident.

There are moments that divide your life into a before and an after. That phone call was one of mine.

What followed was hard, and it changed our family in many ways. Yet out of something frightening and painful eventually came an opportunity I had wanted for years.

I got to come home.

We returned to North Carolina and landed in Winston-Salem.

And almost immediately, something familiar happened.

Community found me again.

In fact, I practically had a Girl Scout troop and a Girl Scout family before I even had a home.

I met wonderful people. My own family was close again. I became involved in the community and taught in the school system.

Life settled.

Then life changed again.

My husband and I divorced.

There isn't always a dramatic explanation for every chapter of a person's life.

Sometimes, life just happens.

I moved out with my children and started figuring out what came next.

Approaching 50 and Asking a Big Question

When COVID arrived, I stopped teaching and began delivering groceries. At the time, it was a change I needed—something that felt a little less hectic and stressful.

But my children were growing up.

My daughter graduated from high school. My son was a senior.

And I was approaching 50.

For most of my adult life, I had been somebody's mother, teacher, troop leader, volunteer, wife, organizer or helper.

Now I found myself asking a question that was both incredibly simple and surprisingly difficult:

What do I want to do with my life?

The answer became The Curvy Fox Boutique.

I called my friend Coral and told her about the idea.

She didn't immediately say yes.

She said, "Let me pray about it."

She came back with an answer.

Yes.

In December 2021, we officially opened the doors.

The Curvy Fox Boutique became another chapter in a life that, in retrospect, had always been about creating places where people could feel seen and supported.

Running a small business isn't easy, though. The economy has made the past few years particularly difficult, and earlier this year I decided I wasn't going to renew the boutique's lease on Hanes Mall Boulevard.

I didn't have a perfect plan for what would happen next.

Sometimes you make the decision you know you need to make and trust that the next door will show itself.

And one night, one did.

220 North Main

My cousin and I had been talking about creating something different—a vendor marketplace where small businesses and makers could have an affordable place to get started.

Late one night, while looking online, I saw a listing for a building at 220 North Main Street.

We went to see it.

We loved it.

And once again, my life turned in a direction I hadn't necessarily planned.

The Curvy Fox Boutique came with me, but the new space became something bigger: Attic 13 on Main, a boutique, antiques and makers market built around independent vendors and small businesses.

We opened in May 2026, and the beginning hasn't been easy. A nearby fire and the resulting street disruptions made getting a brand-new business established even more challenging.

But perhaps that's appropriate.

Because when I look around Attic 13, I don't just see merchandise on shelves.

I see people trying.

I see somebody taking something they make at their kitchen table and wondering whether another person might actually pay money for it. I see small-business owners who need somewhere affordable to begin. I see people sharing ideas, sending customers to one another and learning as they go.

Someday, I would love for Attic 13 to become a place where makers don't just sell what they create, but can actually create it here.

For now, we're giving them a place to start.

And maybe that is enough.

What My Mother Already Knew

When I look back at my life, the individual chapters can seem disconnected.

A little girl growing up without much money.

Factory workers buying her candy bars so she could see Germany.

A scholarship she couldn't afford to use.

Community college.

Social work.

AmeriCorps.

A group of mothers in California raising tens of thousands of dollars for people they would probably never meet.

Girl Scouts.

A terrifying phone call at 4:54 in the morning.

Coming home.

Divorce.

Teaching.

Delivering groceries during a pandemic.

Opening a plus-size boutique at nearly 50.

And now, opening the doors of Attic 13.

But they aren't really disconnected at all.

There is a thread running through every one of them.

People need people.

I've spent much of my life building community, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because I needed one myself.

I learned how powerful it could be from women who worked long hours in factories and still found a few dollars to buy candy bars from somebody else's daughter.

I learned it again when I moved across the country and a group of mothers became my family.

I've seen it in Girl Scouts, schools, nonprofits, small businesses and friendships.

And now I see it inside Attic 13.

Maybe the little girl I was didn't look like someone who would amount to much.

But she was surrounded by people who taught her something far more valuable than that.

My mother was right.

You don't have to have a lot of money to have a rich life.

Sometimes wealth looks like family.

Sometimes it looks like friendship.

Sometimes it looks like a factory worker buying a candy bar.

And sometimes it looks like opening a door for somebody else and saying:

There's room for you here, too.