JOHN DAY — The iconic John Day diner Squeeze-In was set to close at its current location at end of business Tuesday, Oct. 24, after decades of serving up diner food, coffee and good-natured backtalk and providing a meeting place for locals, travelers and the occasional campaigning politician.

But owner Shawn Duncan hopes it won’t be closed for long. After much wrangling and a lot of legwork, it appears Duncan may have been able to line up a new location in Canyon City, at 295 S. Canyon Blvd., according to the sign painted in enthusiastically massive letters on the diner’s window.

Duncan said the current tenants of that space, the Painted Sky Center for the Arts, contacted her after she’d posted on Facebook that her current lease was not being offered for renewal. Painted Sky has been in the process of purchasing another building and thought it could find a solution that allowed a swap, and according to Duncan, the owner was open to the idea.

“I’m hoping to be closed for one month,” Duncan said. “If that doesn’t happen — if it’s sooner than that — I will be tickled.” Duncan hopes the fact that the space used to be a cafe, with a bakery in the back, will ease the transition. And she’s grateful to the folks from Painted Sky for reaching out with the offer.

Getting up and running so quickly will not be easy, however. Duncan says she is motivated to reopen before the holidays and hopes to be able to continue the restaurant’s tradition of serving free Christmas dinners to the community. But the deal depends on having a building to move into, and the space she has lined up is not yet vacant.

Painted Sky is in the process of acquiring a new location, which would free up the building referenced by Squeeze-In’s window sign. Kim Randleas of Painted Sky says they did indeed reach out to offer their space once vacant, but they are still potentially a long ways away from any move, as the purchase of the new building is still pending. “We don’t really have a place to move right now,” she said. “We’re doing our best to help her out, but our timelines aren’t really matching up.”

Shawn Duncan bought the diner nine years ago, after she’d worked as manager of the Squeeze-In for 13 years.

Duncan says she asked to extend the lease at her current location on West Main Street but was told no by her landlady, Monika Fenton. There has been some frustration on Duncan’s part, and from her regulars who don’t want to see a change of venue, that a lease renewal or extension could not have been arranged.

Duncan can’t understand why she can’t stay, as she has offered to pay more rent or sign a new lease. She said the first she knew that she was really going to have to move was when she received a letter from Fenton a month ahead of the deadline.

Fenton, however, said Duncan has known for a year that she would have to move out by the end of this month because that was written into the current lease.

Based on her conversations with Duncan at the time the last agreement was drawn up, Fenton said her understanding was that Duncan was planning to retire at the end of the lease, so she included an addendum to the lease — that both parties signed — specifying that the premises would be handed back “at closing of 10/31/22” and detailing what equipment would stay and what would go. And Fenton says she had not been approached about an extension until the last month or so.

“Nobody realizes how much work it takes to go ahead and get ready for stuff like that,” Fenton said, explaining that her intention was to keep the space as a restaurant, but to do major renovations after the space was handed back to her. “I mean, I have been working on that all year, trying to find contractors. … You have to make sure that that building doesn’t freeze, you know.”

Duncan notes that she had a lot on her mind when she signed that final, one-year lease (which came on the heels of a string of five- and three-year leases), including how to deal with threats to her business from COVID, rising prices and hiring challenges.

“The fact is that I’m 67 and I didn’t want to commit to five years,” she says, but now she wonders if maybe she was a bit too candid in conversations with her landlady in which she verbalized the idea that it might be time to retire. She adds that “I shouldn’t have ever said that.”

It’s easy to see how regular customers and friends of either party could take a strong opinion, and emotional responses have appeared online surrounding the handover. But what is clear now is that when Duncan said she was thinking of retiring, Fenton began preparing as if that was the case. And on the 31st of the month, she’ll have the keys back and can get to work on renovations.

The other certainty is that Duncan will have a busy month time ahead of her, navigating the logistics of the move-out and eventual move-in to the Squeeze-In’s new home — whenever that can take place. It’s also pretty certain that a lot of familiar faces will be more than happy to make the short trip to Canyon City to keep the pancakes, pies and handmade burgers on their plates, once all is said and done.