It’s sunny today and much colder than it looks, still below freezing though outside you’d think it was spring. It isn’t though, not yet.
Soon, maybe.
Yesterday we had a ton of rain, a drizzle at times, a torrent at times, and I had to trudge off to the hardware around the corner for something. Everyone was friendly in the rain, intrepid nod to intrepid nod. I even ran into a neighbor.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said, as he paused for a brief chat, grocery bags in each hand. He recognized me even with the hood, my hair puffing out of it and into the rain.
I learned to love hardware stores from my dad, I’d go with him when I was a kid into the endless aisles of dusty, mysterious wonder. Not echoey Home Depots, or glossy Lowes, but the independently-operated kind.
The ones set up like a maze to squeeze every inch of display space, the kind that keep going even where you think they stop.
And somehow, like Vincent’s restaurant Cafe Diem in Eureka, whatever you need, they have. They don’t have sixty varieties to choose from and they don’t have boxes piled to the ceilings.
But they have what you need.
The man there is a wizard, I firmly believe. I think he’s the owner, I assume he’s the owner, but whenever I’ve walked in needing something for my elderly place he knows exactly what and exactly where, and produces it, as though from thin air.
A screw, a fuse, and yesterday, a faucet.
Ta-da!
I’d called my dad in an echo of those childhood memories and asked him if he was up for a trip to the hardware. He was busy with a model he’s building and wasn’t. But I find it odd how my first instinct was to jump into a car and go to a big box store.
And then it hit me.
My neighborhood hardware would have what I need.
I think we are getting tossed, headfirst and at nauseating speed, into an era of evaluating just how much gloss and glamor and extra is required in our day-to-day. And our habits, borne of carefully honed consumerism, need to be cleaned out like a closet.
I don’t want my automatic to be the big box store. If this country is being ripped to its foundations, let’s really think about what we want to put there going forward.
I want kids to hear that bell at the door, to be amazed and surprised and curious at the bins and the boxes and the tools that seem inscrutable. Let this be an era of rebirth for local buying in all the ways it can be.
And have a great Thursday.
A Bit to Read 
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