Elegy for a hardware store

By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun contributor

This piece was originally published in the September-October 2000 issue of Northern Home magazine.
The poet Nancy Willard claims that hardware stores prove the existence of God. I believe it. For me, hardware stores have always been where the broken things of this world — the unfinished, undone dreams — were given a future. Hardware stores existed to give humans the factual existence of gardens, fences, bird feeders and whole houses where we could at last rest. They also gave me a vocabulary I loved for its quirkiness. How does one know the world without having said “spanner flange”? In a hardware store, learning names was a treat for the mouth, the future was tangible, the world was a place that could get better.
So can you blame me if I’ve met the closing of our local hardware store in Empire with grief? The store stood solidly, broadly at the end of Main Street with its trim white clapboarding and wide porch. It closed suddenly, with little notice. Its closing is the end of an era in my life. Because the Empire hardware store was my own personal hardware store. Or rather, it felt like it. When David and I returned to Leelanau County to build first a rough storage space for camping, later a garage, and finally a house, the hardware store saved our lives every day.
I was given my first tool belt — a tough canvas apron — as a freebie from that hardware store. Several times a week, I refilled orders, learning the difference between galvanized and ardox nails, between treated and white wood. As our buildings progressed, David suggested I was ready for a heavier hammer, and it was at the hardware store they let me try out an Estwing, its glimmering steel more beautiful than silver. I bought utility knives, tape measures, levels. Sue, the woman who worked the counter, automatically handed over new carpenter’s pencils because I constantly lost mine. She showed me how to reload the roof stapler, the caulking gun.
When David and I shingled the cabin, the hardware folks sold us asphalt shingles at a discount because they were having as much fun as we were. They wanted things to work, too. And always there was lumber, a small but effective yard that kept us going through miscounts, mismeasures and miscuts. They let us sort through the 2-by-4s and cut iron rods for me when we were building landscape terracing. It was from that hardware store that David purchased my second tool belt, a powder blue leather belt. He bought it as both warning and honor badge just before we started the work on the main house. I couldn’t have been prouder.
By then, that hardware store was stamped on my soul. I could walk to the garden section and pick up a trowel that fit my hand. I knew where they stored screen doors, crown trim, a small but essential display of greeting cards and mousetraps. They ordered the birdseed my birds liked (or so I believed) and they had the special glue we needed for the subfloor. We could even pull our township permits there in the hardware store, sketching dimensions at the counter while Sue and Leo rang up anchor bolts and sill seal.
More than anything, I wish I could have said good-bye to my hardware store, could have waled through the aisles under terrible fluorescence, run my hands over the rows of caulking and rummaged once again through a bin of copper fittings. I wanted to traipse out with a dozen bags of manure or treated 4-by-4s, or emergency candles, roasting tins, hoses, hooks, tape — all on a closeout sale. I wanted to offer farewells to the kind people who watched me learn to say the word bituthane — pronounced bitch-a-thane — without blushing.
I stand before the empty store at the end of Main Street in Empire. Our house is nearly finished. The hardware store stayed open and vitally important through three different ownerships before finally being lost to us. I am sad. Where am I going to rediscover that the world, though not perfect, is not mad, either? Where but in a hardware store will I be able to trust that my universe is a place to be sorted and ordered, a place to be given the forecast of hope and the stuff to make it happen?
Anne Marie Oomen, chair of the Creative Writing Department at Interlochen Arts Academy, lives in Empire. The house which she and husband David Early have built, is almost complete.