Cost the Crow Adds It Up First

Every morning on Sunny Lane, before the stand even opens, a glossy black crow named Cost hops up onto the counter with a stub of chalk in her beak. Her feathers shine blue-black in the sun, her eyes are bright and clever, and she carries a little chalkboard tucked under one wing. Cost has one big job, and she does it before anyone sells a thing: she adds up what all the supplies cost.

“You can’t know what you earned until you know what you spent,” Cost likes to say, tapping the chalkboard. So she lists it out. Lemons: 30 cents. A bag of sugar: 20 cents. A stack of paper cups: 10 cents. She caws each number as she chalks it, neat and sure.

One day the new helper wanted to skip all that. “Let’s just open! Counting the supplies is boring,” he said, reaching to flip the sign to OPEN. Cost gently blocked the sign with her wing — not cross, just steady. “If we don’t know our cost,” she said kindly, “then at the end of the day we won’t know if we did well or not. Adding it up first isn’t boring. It’s how we stop worrying.”

So together they added. Thirty, and twenty more makes fifty. Fifty, and ten more makes sixty. Cost circled the total on her board: 60 cents. “There,” she said, and her shoulders relaxed, feathers settling smooth. “That is our cost. Sixty cents already flew away this morning — but now we KNOW it, so it can’t sneak up on us later.”

Say it with Cost, out loud: “Add what you buy, before the day goes by.”

The helper looked at the tidy total and felt the same calm Cost felt. It wasn’t scary after all — it was just a number, written down where they could both see it. “Sixty cents,” he repeated, and nodded. Now, whatever happened at the stand today, they had a starting number to measure everything against.

That is Cost’s move. Before the first cup is poured, add up every single thing you had to buy. Say each price, write the total, and circle it. Your cost is money that has already gone — but once you know it, you are never guessing in the dark again.