End of an era
It was really the last day for Highland Hardware in Newton Highlands MA.
(Not Highland Hardware in Atlanta! They're going strong and emailed me on August 31 2006 to ask that I update this post so as not to give the impression that they're closing!)
We walked over there after checking our post office box. You could barely tell that it had been a hardware store; only the pile of stuff in the middle, with lots of nuts, bolts, electrical and plumbing fittings, was really a tip off. An article in the local paper had said that the store was once a grocery store or small supermarket. We could see how they knew. The store was being emptied out to the brick and tile walls. On one side, exposed after 40 years behind pegboard, was lettering in cobalt blue and white tiles: “Poultry”, “Meat”. Farther along the tile had been painted over, but through the dingy yellow paint you could see the dark blue tiles that said “Fish”. The store turns a little dogleg in the back. The alcove back there that had once had racks of plumbing fittings was stripped of its racks and the rough brick wall showed. The entire back wall, which a week ago was behind hundreds of pull-out trays of boxes of all sizes of screws, eyebolts, washers, cotter pins, machine screws, elastic insert nuts, wing nuts, stove bolts, carriage bolts, machine screws, self tapping sheet metal screws, acorn nuts, lock washers, you name it, was bare. It looked as though the only merchandise that hadn't sold at the clearance prices was a rack of signs. Up near the front was a table covered with boxes of pizza and boxes of donuts. We don't know if it was a thank-you gesture from the store owner to his customers and to the neighborhood handymen who were there every morning to pick up supplies (and who took over as cashiers when the owner was in back helping another customer) or a contribution from other local businesses.
We left, paying $3 for all the scrap plexiglas we could find in the back. Arlene will take most of it to school for kids to roll out ink for blockprinting on, and use a couple of the bigger chunks for printing plates herself.
We went from there out to Mass. Audubon's Broadmoor sanctuary in Sherborn. We turned right at the bluebird tree, which didn't have any bluebirds today, and explored the trails in the part of the sanctuary that we hardly ever go into. Frogs were calling from the swampy areas, wood frogs making a strange quacking noise. I spotted a brown creeper before Arlene did -- a good thing, because I had seen one in Edmands Park a week ago and she hadn't seen one in a long time. Brown creepers are birds only a birder much loves; they look like an animated chunk of bark working its way in a spiral up a tree. Nuthatches walk down trees and brown creepers walk up them, but I've never heard of any head-on collisions between them. Besides looking for insects in crevices in the bark, they must watch where they're going out of the corner of their eye.
In the evening we went to a Mexican-theme potluck supper at the home of Arlene's computer mentor Terri. Terri's husband is in biotech. Many of the people there were his coworkers and were talking about the protests now going on about a biotech conference in Boston. It's nothing like the scale of the protests against the WTO in Seattle a few months ago, but one of the women at the party had to leave her lab earlier that day because of a bomb scare at her workplace. Strangely, people were very nice about letting me talk about my work. I don't know if I can be interesting or if they were just particularly polite.
As you can see, I'm just ducking the issue of not having updated in a month. There's no good reason for not having updated, just laziness.
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