Behind the Ironic Column

No, I don’t mean computer hardware but the old-fashioned kind – nuts and bolts and pliers and screwdrivers.  I’m not much of a shopper, at least not in the traditional go-to-the-mall-and-spend-the-afternoon sense.  But I am fond of hardware stores, particularly the all-purpose kind where you could find almost anything and usually ended up with something you didn’t deliberately go looking for. 

But that’s a digression.  What I started out to say was that I know it’s spring because I had the unreasonable desire to buy a pair of pliers today.  I stopped at Fred Meyer, mostly for a couple of grocery items, but of course I entered on the side of the store where they had household goods and before I knew it I was comparing sizes of needle-nose pliers.  This is silly because I don’t *need* pliers – well, occasionally I really need them but those occasions are so far apart it hardly counts as needing them.  And I know I’ve purchased more than one of these before – this is what comes of assembling and breaking up households.  You can distinctly remember buying something at least twice but still not have it in hand.  It’s not that you’re losing your mind, it’s that you’ve lost spouses or live-in friends who just happened to collect that item as their half of the property.  Today’s observations are all digression so far.

The previous spouse remark does have something to do with why I associate hardware stores with spring, though.  Way back when, during an early marriage and during the early days of it, my husband and I used to go on Saturday mornings over to a farmers’ market.  I’ve always loved farmers’ markets and go to them with or without companions.  We would get up early, drive over there and amaze ourselves with the baked goods and the flowers.  I think it was only held in the spring – at any rate what I remember most are the armloads of flowers, not armloads of vegetables.  We would buy a few things (being on a fairly stringent budget), then we would go over to the hardware store and spend time wandering around, finding new and esoteric pieces of kitchen or household equipment and buying the occasional tool or device.  This store was in the upscale part of town in a southern city, but it definitely had some country roots.  Not as country as the one we sometimes drove to out on the back roads – there they had everything from chicken feed to overalls to various tobacco farm implements.   Our upscale hardware didn’t have all that but made up for it by carrying things like French melon ballers that I didn’t need then and don’t need now – and as far as I know I’ve never bought one.  I still have other things that I bought there – a Mouli grater with three different wheels for varying degrees of fineness.  I used it just a couple of weeks ago – no spouse or live-in made off with it.   So, it was spring, we  were happily married, and we spent our Saturday mornings amusing ourselves with the kind of shopping that might have some relationship to an afternoon at the mall but felt completely different. 

Which goes a little way toward explaining why today, with the sun out  and flowers blooming, I was sidetracked from grocery shopping into the limited hardware aisle at my local store.  I was alone and it’s not Saturday, but it’s still Spring.

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