A box of Saltine crackers and honey sat on Erin Powers’ desk inside her office at Bo Jon’s Flowers on Dec. 2, the final time the River Falls business opened its doors to the public after starting in 1969.
As Powers worked in her shop that late afternoon, she pulled out Zofran, one of her many medications. The crackers ease the stomach, the honey lowers her blood sugar. With Zofran — “the meds that they give me, it’s a med that they give to people who go through chemotherapy, have cancer,” she said.
Powers faces a litany of health complications as doctors are still trying to figure out what’s wrong. She may need a second open-heart surgery. Her daughter, Cara, announced on a GoFundMe that Powers was passing out several times a day and experiencing other problems. The store is closing, Cara wrote, because “health issues between both my parents are forcing us to take a different path for now.”
“We aren’t capable of doing all the things that we need to do to survive the day, let alone run a business, so with that, we have decided that we need to shut down the business,” she wrote on the fundraising page.
Cara was in the store Dec. 2, helping her mother sell what remained before the auction. Originally, the plan was to close Bo Jon’s on Nov. 21, but some loyal customers couldn’t make it by then, with Thanksgiving just days away. Those customers pleaded with Erin to keep it open a bit longer. Many of those people didn’t show up, according to Erin.
Some still did. Doctors advised her not to stand, but Erin did so anyway, working the cash register, walking around, conversing with customers. Coworkers, some of them family members, worked in the background, coming to Erin for the prices of unmarked items. Erin’s husband, Jeff, a quality technologist at 3M before semi-retiring, also helped out in the store. He requires five surgeries for his health concerns.
The GoFundMe means to provide money for both of their medical bills. Selling the store’s inventory ideally covers the rest.
“I keep saying to people, ‘I’m not trying to make money. I just need to make my money back,’” Erin said. “I see things in the equation of what medicine is that going to buy me?”
Jeff, Erin’s husband sits at the computer inside Bo Jon’s. Photo: Jack White/Star-Observer.
Erin bought Bo Jon’s in 2022, in part, to better cultivate her daughter Cara’s passions.“My approach was instead of telling Cara that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and not touch anything, I was more like, ‘show me what you can do,’” Erin said.
Cara graduates from River Falls High School this year. Erin hopes that the high school will let her daughter provide the flower arrangements for graduation, with Bo Jon’s still doing special events after closing its brick-and-mortar. Cara worked long hours at the store to keep the business open amid the family’s health issues and hospital visits.
“I just wish it was a little bit different, a little bit easier for her,” Erin said.
With the GoFundMe, Erin now resides on the opposite end of community members helping a local business. Before this, she started one to help Chad and Carol Trainor.
Carol, one of the owners of Urban Olive & Vine, experienced health complications that left her in the hospital. Her husband, Chad, also an owner, stepped away from the restaurant in Hudson to be with his wife.
Chad and Carol didn’t really know Erin before she set up the GoFundMe. Erin would bring her kids — Liam, 20, Jonah, 19, and Cara, 18 — to Urban Olive & Vine when they were younger. Eventually, it became their happy place. When she heard the news about Carol, Erin wanted to do something. She helped raise more than $100,000 for the couple, not for medical costs but to keep Urban Olive & Vine in business as its owners stepped away. Carol died in May 2025. She was 58.
With that GoFundMe now closed, Chad has started a memorial fund honoring Carol, which gives proceeds to others in the community. He also wants to create a scholarship in his wife’s name.
Chad sat in Erin’s office on Bo Jon’s final day. He helped out the family, and went to the flower shop in the weeks before it closed. He watched Erin and others load up items and close down the store to help offset medical bills. This time last December, Chad was in the hospital with Carol.
“She did the last GoFundMe,” Chad said of Erin. “And now I’m trying to do that stuff for my wife,” he said of the memorial fund. “And now I don’t know how to do that stuff.”
As Chad mourned the death of his wife, he heard about Erin’s health. He said he wants to help Erin after what she did for him. He went to the store in River Falls to give her money and donated to the GoFundMe.
“I have no reason other than if I can help someone. That’s it,” he said.
Chad has said multiple times over the years that he doesn’t have friends. Erin tries to prove him wrong. As a light-hearted joke, she offered him a friendship contract. She also brought him to her family’s Christmas this year.
Chad signed the friendship contract and made good on the agreement shortly after. Using her own money, Cara recently bought a car, a 1989 original Corvette, at an auction. The car had its original tires, too. Chad handed her a check on Bo Jon’s final day to cover the cost of new ones.
Erin talks to a customer. Doctors told her to not stand up, but she did so anyway on her store’s last day. Photo: Jack White/Star-Observer.
Cara said the family has organized a GoFundMe before, for Erin’s first open-heart surgery. That time, they needed $140,000. They raised $50.
Since then, Erin’s GoFundMe for Chad has met its goal — and then some. Cara set this one at $50,000. They’re roughly halfway to that goal at the time of publishing. Seeing her daughter work at the store, maintain her grades and become who she is makes Erin a proud mother.
“She sees the world as big and that’s what I want my kids to see,” Erin went on. “Put your phone down, because look at the people around you.”
Erin said she’s the definition of a complex patient. For years, doctors have worked to parse out her health problems. She’s a diagnosed Type 1 diabetic, but they’ve yet to figure out why she has issues besides that.
She’s been to a range of doctors. She thinks that while many can handle one or two of her problems, the majority cannot deal with every one.
When Erin needed her first open-heart surgery, she used to go to Mayo Clinic for treatment. Then her problems stopped in 2024. She felt better and started going in around once a year.
In 2025, her problems came back.
“Then, all of a sudden, it just seemed like somebody flipped a switch and just everything went wrong,” Erin said.
Now, she’s extremely fatigued, barely able to do anything without having to lie down. She’s in the process of switching health services back to Mayo Clinic. Her insurance originally didn’t cover what she needed there, so she had to switch providers.
Before her business closed, she had trouble getting needles for her insulin at the pharmacy. So she started reusing old ones. She’s visually impaired and she recalled how she dropped her last stick of gum in the snow. She laughed about it after.
“I want to be on: that is hilarious, that is funny,” she said.
Amid all the bureaucratic hoops, the health scares, the stresses of closing a business while paying for medical bills, Erin stood around a small group of customers Dec. 2, chatting and laughing as they discussed the store and their personal lives. One customer walked in and asked how she was doing.
“Good, we are here,” Erin replied. “We are grateful to be here.”