Making a run for it

I did something the other day I haven’t done in a very long time. Me, myself and I hopped in the car and headed out with no particular destination in mind. Our first stop was at the cemetery, where I gave the recently planted flowers a little drink to tide them over until the next time.

While I was footloose and fancy-free, I headed to Wooster, one of my favorite towns around these parts. Every time I go there, I think I could live in that charming town to our south. Some wonderful old homes line the downtown streets and I think, “Oh, if the walls, or porches, could talk.”

I actually came close to living there in my fresh-out-of-business-school years when I got my first job, as it turns out, in Wooster. A friend and I were both working downtown and thought what fun it would be to find a place there and start our wild and woolly life after high school.

Alas, my mother, in all her wisdom and wily ways, convinced me my money would go a lot further if I stayed under her roof for the time being. So I never lived in Wooster.

But I continued to visit and shop there, well, forever. And I guess that’s why I found myself popping in and out of the trendy little shops downtown that now sit where I used to shop at places like Freedlander’s and Annat’s, and Mollie Miller and Amster Shoes, and a high-end ladies dress shop that was too rich for my young blood. Its name escapes me, of course.

My browsing, unencumbered by anyone – children, grandchildren or husband – who keep asking what I’m looking for and can we go now, found me in a consignment shop where I was thrown into another place in time.

The first thing that caught my eye was a very old prom dress made of what was, in an earlier time, white netting, with a charming little red ribbon on the shoulder. There should have been a photo attached with the original owner and her escort for the evening standing straight and tall by her side, ready for their big night out.

Moving along, keeping an eye out for a possible office desk, I spotted a carved wooden headboard attached to a full-size bed from, I might venture to guess, a time period maybe a good hundred years ago. Not my cup of tea, but maybe someone in the business of restoring one of those old homes up the street might want to take a gander.

I found a wonderful old baby buggy complete with a retractable sunshade and sturdy spring suspension system to assure a comfortable ride for a snoozing infant whose parents believed in getting some air each day.

Dial telephones, manual Underwood typewriters and early IBM Selectric electric typewriters, radios through the years, Life and Look magazines. Complete dining room necessities featuring classic dinnerware, from soup tureens and teapots and silverware to a hutch to display it all when not in use. A wall of hutches. Evidently, hutches are no longer in fashion.

Actually, no one in my family that I can recall ever had a hutch. We didn’t even have a dining room. We kept our dishes in a cabinet or cupboard right there in the kitchen, handy to all. We were simple folk.

Moving along, I spotted a display of painted white wicker porch furniture that included a rocker, of course, and a settee and side table. My grandmother’s porch glider and metal rocking chairs came to mind. And Boston coolers and lightning bugs.

One more glance around this charmer of a shop and I spot, leaning against one of the hutches, oddly out of place, a very old wooden pair of crutches. I laughed out loud and wished I had a friend there to enjoy my find.

I’d seen it all now, from hutches to crutches. My day was complete.