This week, I received a number of panicked, sometimes angry e-mails from people driving by the Round House Cafe.

There is a big and ugly “For Sale By Owner” sign in the front and side window. The cafe is closed this week for a much-needed Labor Day holiday, but for people driving by, it appeared as if the cafe had gone out of business. How else to read a closed building with that sign in the front window?

The inside of the cafe is lovingly and precisely organized – fresh flowers on every table, warm shutters and beautiful tin ceilings. The signs almost seem an insult. The cafe is very much in business.

In fact, the cafe will re-open on Monday, September 12th, and I am sure of this because I talk to Scott Carrino almost daily and my portrait show is hanging on the walls inside. This seemed an ugly and troubling – even hostile thing – to me.  It throws the building and the interior off balance and strikes a troubling note, even as real negotiations for the building are just getting underway.

Is it pressure? I don’t really know.

Several months ago, Scott and Lisa Carrino, who have been slaving for several years to keep this cafe in our community, and to make it a place where we can all gather, launched a gofundme project  to raise $75,000 to buy the building. It has been on the market for nine years, and the owner is asking $250,000.

The crowdsourcing project has been spectacularly successful, it has raised more than $57,000 from local people and others from all over the country. People have been coming into the care steadily offering envelopes with cash and personal checks, they have contributed several thousand additional dollars.

It is not yet enough, Scott and Lisa say they need between ten and $15,000 more to buy the property at a price they can afford.  It promises to be a difficult and complex negotiation, made more intense and wrought by these signs that have suddenly appeared in the cafe windows.

Scott will have to make his own decisions about this building and I have no idea what it is in the landlord’s mind. My first response to the signs  was anger. I wanted to take the signs down, and I even went down to the cafe, but the signs are inside the window and, of course, it is  up to Scott to take them down, not me.

So I just took a photo.

The cafe means a great deal to the two and to many others. So many of our community institutions are gone, this is the story of rural life in America, the land the politicians left behind. Here, we are determined to keep our community intact, this is one of the only places for miles where we can gather and talk to one another.

There is, of course, some grumbling here about the gofundme. Why should we give money so they can buy their building? This is an almost inevitable by-product of crowd-sourcing, a radical and very democratic way of raising funds. People know precisely where the money is going, they can contribute or not.

Many hundreds of people voted for community when they gave $60,000 to Scott and Lisa to keep their cafe in Cambridge, and to vote for community. We must have more than empty store fronts,  box stores and franchises in our towns and villages if the very idea of community is to survive.

So it seems we are at a crossroads.

Scott and Lisa are working hard to raise the additional money, it continues to come in. They can’t possibly work any harder than they are working now or do better work. The cafe is now successfully embedded in the soul of the town. It would be devastating to lose it.

I know Scott well, this is all about community for him, and he is not someone who ever plans to get rich or who ever will get rich.

So we are approaching the final chapter.

Scott and Lisa and their landlord will have some hard decisions to make, and we will all be affected by the  outcome. I hope the good guys can win this one, the corporate tsunami is engulfing community everywhere.

I am going to contribute more to this project and others will have to make up their own minds or that others may join this campaign. I hope Scott and Lisa can raise the funds they need, I hope the landlord will take those ugly and jarring signs out of the window.

I hope there can be a real negotiation conducted openly and in good faith.

The idea of community is precious, it is time in my mind to  reverse the awful flow and fight for community. You can see the project here.