It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust from the bright white snowy street to the dim surroundings inside. The door jingles as I close it behind me, yet there’s no urgency to summon assistance. I’m just here to browse, to slip back in time. The smell of everything ever sold reminds me where I am. Black rubber boots with red soles, woolen socks and insulated navy coveralls line the walls. I run my hands over the gloves: leather, suede, cotton. My shoes drip moisture into the old wooden floors, which cannot be sanded down any further. In the corners, where I head, there’s still a sheen of yellow varnish. On a dusty shelf, I spot preserves and start to laugh at a memory, tucked away like the layers of merchandise all around me. I pick up a mason jar and remember the February decades earlier, when my dad stood where I now stand. Realizing it was Valentine’s Day, and the stores were closing, and he was out of time, he decided the thing my mother would most love to receive would be a jar of pickles. You can guess my mother’s reaction. “But they’re really good pickles!” my dad insisted. They must be, because you can still buy them twenty-five years later.
James Hindle emerges from the back of his eponymous hardware store a few minutes later. The years haven’t changed him either. When I tell him my name and admit that I don’t need anything – how can I explain that I just want to hear the old-fashioned cash register clang and admire the authentic tin tile roof? – He gives me his classic wry grin and goes off in search of a photograph. I don’t think I need anything but I stumble upon a marble rolling pin, clear Anchor Hocking nesting bowls and a wooden sand timer (to get my kids to brush their teeth for two minutes?) Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you slow down a bit and browse an aisle with no exit in a small town on a wintry afternoon. James, “Jimmy” to the local farmers who depend on him for the Japanese pruners he imports, comes back triumphant. He’s found the magazine article about my parent’s farm, and he decides to put it on display in the window, though we’re months away from strawberry season.
I’ve reminisced about the “patch” before, but Jimmy Hindle was a unique customer. He had his store to man during P.Y.O hours, so he had special permission to come to the field after six and pick his flat or two of berries. Once he’d loaded his car, he’d head out through the valley and knock on the doors of his fellow congregants. “Well if you show up with strawberries,” he told me, “you stay for a little visit.” His rounds took all evening, a June tradition he’d repeat year after year. Of course, he wasn’t just well known for fruit delivery. James Hindle was also the local licensed dynamite expert. His controlled explosion may have gotten a little out of control from time to time, but for those local legends, you’ll have to eavesdrop at the coffee shop and hear them for yourself, from the people who were there to witness it. The survivors, let’s say.
You can’t go home again, but you can drop in at Hindle’s Hardware, close your eyes and remember. Almost every single storefront on the main street of Clarksburg has changed, except for Hindle’s and the grocery store. As a small child, we lived in a big red house on the hill, across from Dinsmore’s trucking yard. My mother would pack up my younger brothers in a double stroller and we’d make the daily trek to the post office. We passed the cold storage, where local apples waited to be wholesaled out of town. Next was the daycare on the corner, then, my favourite: the Volkswagen dealership. The secretary’s desk abutted the window. As soon as she saw our caravan approaching she’d run onto the sidewalk and pull us into her perfumed bosom. I was enchanted by her shellacked updo and her lipstick. Sometimes she would take her finger and wipe a bit off so I could have red lips, too. Then, as glamorous as she was, I’d saunter past the hardware store, the general store (and Sears catalogue pick-up location!) before finally arriving at the post office.
As I stroll in and out of the art galleries that now dominate this stretch of street, I’m happy to see it thriving, but wistful for the simple world it was before. But maybe I’m wistful for who I was before.
Young. Trusting. Confident a bit of lipstick would take me where I needed to go.