A Muskegon woman's small business is changing lives. Her memory lives on for generations through her downy hair and cute-as-a-button nose.
MUSKEGON, MI — Living rooms are meant to be lived in.
The coffee table in Montana Scalf's Muskegon apartment? It's not a very appropriate name.
“I like to think of myself as a kind of surgeon, but my patients aren't as dangerous as real patients,” she said.
There are no drinks on her coffee table. She ended up on the operating table.
“If you make one wrong stitch, the whole thing comes undone. So you have to be very careful where you cut,” Montana said.
At Dr. Montana's hospital, every patient is a friend, and every friend is a patient.
“They're the kind of friends you can't talk back to,” she laughed.
“I didn't really talk to people when I was little, and I think my parents noticed that, so they bought me this stuffed animal and that stuffed animal,” Montana explained. did.
Its comfort never fades, but cotton definitely does.
“My husband works third shift, so I was feeling a bit lonely. And I really wanted someone to be by my side, not just the cat.”
She pulled an old stuffed animal out of storage. She certainly smelled like she hadn't been loved in decades.
“This is my first customer,” she said, holding the rabbit. “He's just over 20 years old. My parents bought him when I was born. After we pulled him out, I thought, 'Cause his ears are floppy. I had to fix it. He looked very sad.”
As we worked to repair old friends, new ones were born.
“I was like, 'Oh, wait! There's actually something here,'” she said.
Currently, her living room is barely enough space for her burgeoning business.
“More and more people keep contacting me and saying, 'Oh, can you fix my nose? Oh, can you give me more fillings? His beads fell out.' “I say,” she says. “It’s becoming a full-time job, which is great.”
A small stuffed bunny ignited my passion for Montana. Although her patients are gentle, the job is not without its challenges.
“I had a recent client who was a 60-year-old bear, and it turned out to be Frankenstein's bear,” she said. “She was like, I want this bear to come back to health…it belonged to my mom…my mom died,” she said.
“A wolf that was in a house fire when the owner, Keegan, was a kid. She said basically everything was lost. And they were kind of digging through the rubble. And thankfully Best of all, they found the wolf for her.”
Montana said the wolf smelled like smoke.
“It was a very sad process just seeing what that stuffed animal went through, let alone what the family went through,” she said. “To be able to get a stuffed animal back like that… it’s really amazing.”
There are no cups to be found on the coffee table in her living room. Just scissors, pincushion, and seam ripper.
But it's a place where Montanna's cup overflows.
“It's very important that stuffed animals are kept in people's lives,'' Montanna said with a smile. “Whether a stuffed animal is young or old, it's a memory.”
► If you have a stuffed animal you'd like to keep for the love of your life, you can book Montana's services on our Facebook page here.
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