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# The store on Main Street
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-store-on-main-street/
- Published: 2026-10-22T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T10:00:00.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional

*"The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage." — Psalm 16:6*

The hardware store on Main Street is a different store now. It has been a different store for twenty years — it is a gift shop that sells candles and hand-painted signs that say things like GATHER and BLESSED, and every time I walk past it I think the same thought, which is that my father would have had something to say about that.

His store was called Boyd's Hardware and it smelled like sawdust and motor oil and the metal of new nails, and in October it smelled like all of those things plus wood smoke because he kept a potbellied stove in the back near the plumbing aisle and lit it the first week of October and did not put it out until the first week of April. The store was warm in October in a way that the rest of Main Street was not, and people came in who did not need anything because the store was warm and my father was there and both things were reasons enough.

I worked there on Saturdays when I was twelve and thirteen. I sat on a high stool behind the counter and rang up purchases on a register that was older than I was and made a sound like a small bell every time the drawer opened, and the men who came in called me Rubybird, which is what my father called me when I was small and which nobody has called me since he died.

He knew everyone. He knew who was building a porch and who was fixing a roof and who was putting in a garden and who had bought the wrong size bolt the week before and would be back for the right one. He did not write any of this down. He carried it in his head the way he carried the inventory — not as a list but as a landscape, a map of the town and what it needed.

The psalmist says the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, and I think about that when I think about the store. The boundary lines of my father's life were four walls on Main Street and a stool behind the counter and a potbellied stove and a town full of people whose porches he knew. That was not a small life. That was a life the size of a town, and a town is not small when you know every porch in it.

The candle store closes at five. My father's store closed when the last person left, which was sometimes seven and sometimes later, and he walked home for supper and my mother had it on the table and he sat down and ate it and did not talk much and then went to the porch and watched the dark come and that was the day.

*Lord, the boundary lines were pleasant. I sat on the stool. I remember the bell.*