Small Town

Yesterday, I fell in love with our small town all over again. A friend's kindergartner's class (follow that one) is trying to collect postcards from all 50 states, and I volunteered to send one from NC, which meant I had to find a postcard.

After our weekly trip to our fabulous library, the kids and I headed to the Chamber of Commerce to see where we could find a postcard of our historic town. The one room Chamber, tucked into a historic building, was filled with brochures of upcoming events, maps, and all manner of other information, and the back was filled with a large table surrounded by mismatched antique chairs. The volunteers were meeting to discuss all of the summer happenings, but they cheerfully stopped their meeting to greet us and encourage us to take anything from the shelves. I asked about postcards, and they directed us to the local hardware--as in the only hardware in downtown.

The kids and I headed out, and Evan promptly found himself in heaven. The hardware is like entering a time warp where you could find any odd or end you might need in one place: boxes of loose screws and bolts, all manner of hand tools, seed packets, pinwheels, wooden toys, small tractors, canned goods, motor oil, and jars of candy. The wooden floors creaked as we explored, and the narrow aisles whispered charming and death trap simultaneously. The postcards are prints of a local artist's paintings of historic sights, and they truly look like tiny oil paintings. We finally chose one that features the historic buildings that line the main street, complete with the local newspaper box and a man in thoroughly modern clothing walking down the sidewalk. As we checked out, the elderly lady who "minds the store since she retired" produced a case of Tootsie Pops and offered one to each child, holding the box patiently while they chose the perfect one. I'm certain we cost her more than we paid for the postcard.

The kids enjoyed their suckers as we walked the sidewalk in our postcard back to the library, greeting people we passed and admiring windows of the little shops, stopping to smell pansies in window boxes, and in general slowing down--the way I always do when I'm downtown, falling in love all over again.