Category Archives: VA

For All Good Gifts, We are Thankful

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One of the joys of running a small-town bookshop is how often people come in with stuff they just want to give you. Here are a few of our favorites:

  • Last week neighbors who winter garden stopped in for the first time ever, told us how much they enjoyed the book, and handed over a large plastic bag filled with… blue-green curly stuff. I admit freely that my idea of cooking is a lot of ingredients thrown into one dish, and no stirring, but our new friends thoughtfully added an index card detailing instructions on how to steam the kale to perfection. It was so delicious, shopsitter Andrew and I fought over the last piece.
  • Awhile back, Jack was feeling poorly and went upstairs to bed just before one of our regulars came in. Frank has two fixations in life: homeopathic medicine, and JFK’s assassination. He often stops by to gather reading material on both. When he discovered his favorite Scottish co-conspiracy theorist was tucked up in bed, he said, “I know just what he needs,” nipped out to his truck, and came back with a bottle of Nature’s Remedy Cayenne Pepper Pills. “Guaranteed to cure what ails you,” he said, thrusting them at me. “One tonight, one in the morning. I’ll check back to see how he’s doing.” (Jack recovered.)
  • A man who buys thrillers and western stopped in, looking sheepish, and handed over a paper bag. Inside, a canning jar was about 1/4 full of clear liquid, two dried apricots swimming in it. “It was full,” he said, “and I intended it for y’all, but my son stopped by and he found it where I had it hid in the cupboard.” Jack unscrewed the lid and lightning and purple snakes flew from the brew. He certainly enjoyed those apricots.
  • It’s a sad fact that we can’t take our yarn stashes with us when we go; many donations of a late loved one’s wooly goods have made their way to the bookshop, where the needlework babes spend a pleasant evening untangling them for the communal stash drawer.
  • One Spring day a child who lives in the neighborhood and likes to hang out in the shop walked in and handed me a shoebox. “I brung you a rabbit,” he said. Nervously, I shifted the lid an inch–to reveal a very tall, very stylish paper-mache rabbit sculpted by his small hands from newspaper. Around the base was painted “Bookstore Ester Bunnie.”
  • A woman who shops with us infrequently opened the door and said, “This was at a yard sale, and I thought of you because I wanted to buy it but I didn’t need it.” In her arms lay a beautiful black 1930s-era typewriter. She supervised its placement on a display table, stepped back, and smiled. “I knew it would fit in here,” she said, and marched out without another word.
  • Another woman walked in and handed me a lava lamp. “I didn’t want to throw it away, thought it would like nice in the children’s room here,” she said, beaming. My husband stared at the offending object. “Looks phallic,” he muttered. (BTW, do you know how hard it is to “accidentally” break a lava lamp? Took four tries.)

It’s good to run a shop in a small town. Mendy, who recently opened a local craft store, said she scored three pies, a potholder loom and a dozen brownies her first week.

Pottering Happily About

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This morning I woke up at home, next to Jack, with two cats piled atop me and a dog jackknifed against my knees. Crooked sleep under my own duvet…. {blissful sigh}.

Shopsitter Andrew’s parents arrived unexpectedly last night–you should have seen that lad’s face–so we gave him the day off to run about and see the bright light of Wise County. (There’s a new traffic light on the four-lane.)

Jack had prison visits this morning with the Quaker ministry, so that left me in the bookstore with its pristine shelves Andrew’s been sorting day by day, and some odd jobs we never bothered to show him because they don’t come up that often.

With gusto, I tied my hair back and tackled the list: rolling coins from the change drawer; investigating the odd smell coming from one corner of the mystery room (an air freshener had fallen behind a shelf and gone septic); gathering all the odds and ends of crackers and cookies into the bread tin. Jack and I live above the shop, so one half of our downstairs kitchen is bookstore, the other half functioning as a staff room with fridge and microwave. Imagine if the public could see your staff room. :[

In short, I reveled in the quiet pottering of a nesting bird, re-establishing herself on home turf. Bookstore, sweet bookstore, and it’s all mine–well, mine and Jack’s, and now part Andrew’s too, bless the boy. (He’s 27; I’m only calling him a boy for poetic purposes.)

One of the things people have asked about, on the book tour, is what it’s like to own a bookshop. Over and over again I found myself describing a theme that recurs in the book and in our lives: not renting inside one’s own skin. The bookstores we are visiting are independent ones, like ours, for the most part. They don’t have corporate manuals that tell you how things are done. The problems, the challenges, running out of shelf space and trying to find a way to categorize a particular book and figuring out the best use of your limited wall display area, etc.: all these belong to you.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans are taught to despise smallness, not intentionally, just in the daily messages we absorb. We’re encouraged to lead big, “Madmen” kind of lives, vying for the top of the food chain, ladder, whatever.

But let me tell you, there is nothing like rolling the change you collected one customer at a time, from people whose names and reading tastes you know, and putting their dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher after they’ve left, in the bookstore you own. Living large comes in many forms, and some lives– like the Tardises of Dr. Who fame– are larger inside than they appear at a glance.
My day is passing in a contented haze of small chores that will keep our shop cozy and functional.

It don’t get no better’n this.