Summers when I was a girl

"He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." — Ecclesiastes 3:11

I have been thinking about the summers when I was a girl and how they were long in a way that summers have not been since.

My father opened the store at seven and closed it at five and in between the town came in and out and he stood behind the counter and knew everyone by name and knew what they needed before they asked because that is the kind of man he was, the kind who paid attention to what people reached for. If a man came in for nails three weeks running my father would ask him about the project and the man would tell him and my father would listen and then say something that made the man feel like what he was building mattered, even if it was a fence.

In the summers I would go to the store after breakfast and sit on the high stool behind the counter and my father would let me ring up the small purchases, the bolts and the sandpaper and the hooks, and the drawer of the register was heavy and made a sound when it opened that I can still hear if I close my eyes, which I am doing now, at this table, in July, sixty-some years later.

The store smelled like sawdust and oil and the particular metal smell of the bins where the hardware lived, sorted by size. I did not know the names of everything but I knew where they went because my father kept the store in the kind of order that made sense even to a child. Everything had a place and nothing was where it did not belong and that included me, which is to say that I belonged there, on the stool, behind the counter, in the smell of sawdust, in the company of a man who did not talk much but talked enough.

The heat came through the open door and my father did not have air conditioning because the building was old and the wiring would not take it and because, I think, he did not mind the heat the way other people did. He was a man who had been through worse than a Virginia summer and he did not complain about things that were only uncomfortable.

I walked home for lunch and the road was hot under my shoes and the trees made a tunnel of shade along the sidewalk and the cicadas were the sound of July the way the creek was the sound of evening. My mother had lunch on the table and we ate and she did not ask me about the store because she knew I would tell her the interesting parts without being asked and the interesting parts were always about the people who came in, never about the hardware.

I am at my kitchen table now and the cicadas are outside and the heat is the same heat and the road into town is the same road and my father's store is something else now but the building is still there and sometimes when I drive past it I can see the stool through the window that is not there anymore, and the girl on it, and the man behind the counter who knew what everyone needed.

Lord, the building is still there. The man is not. Both of these are true.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.