CHANGE IS COMING TO WARNER NEW HAMPSHIRE.
THE LOCAL HARDWARE STORE HAS BEEN SOLD
AND RESIDENT LOIS SHEA WONDERS IF THE TOWN HAS LOST SOMETHING IN THE BARGAIN.
Everything you need, they have at Perkins Hardware.
Hunting licenses and work gloves, hoses and stapleguns and caulking and crowbars and cake pans and axe handles and cold apple juice. They have tarpaper and suet and spackling compound and oil filters and clothespins.
Aisles here are one body-width wide. And you?d better not turn around fast.
In Perkins, you stare at the shelves like one of those ?find-the-hidden-picture? puzzles ? convinced that if you peer a little bit harder into the bedlam of merchandise, you?ll find that little glass thingy that goes on top of the percolator.
The only other way to find anything is to take three steps inside the door, stop and ask:
?Lynn, have you got any eight-inch stovepipe???
Lynn Perkins is grey-haired, wiry, and in constant motion. In a dozen years, the only time I?ve seen him sit down was at Town Meeting.
Mornings, Lynn is out front, stacking bags of rock salt or fertilizer, arranging trash cans and ladders. Drivers wave, he watches out for kids who go past on bikes.
Lynn and Chris Perkins have run this place for nearly 20 years. (?Large enough to serve you,? it says on their business card, ?small enough to care.?) Lynn has been known to sell a gas grill to some old folks ? and then show up at their house to put it together.
The building has been a hardware store, off and on, since before the Civil War.
But this isn?t really a story about hardware.
At Perkins, I can get a critique of the selectmen?s meeting with my shingling nails. I can find out who has dry cordwood left and talk about what a good year it was for peaches. I can ship something by UPS and thank the woman on the rescue squad ? the woman who held my father?s hand in the ambulance the night he had the heart attack.
I can pull up to the front porch with my daughter asleep in the car ? and ask Lynn to watch her while I run inside for light bulbs.
You can?t get that stuff at Wal-Mart. Not at any price.
The news ripped through town the other day that Perkins Hardware had been sold to the Aubuchon chain. If a town can be said to collectively grimace, Warner did that day.
Lynn and Chris want to retire, and the store had been for sale for a while. You can?t blame them. (Though we did try to dissuade them. One devout family even prayed every night that Lynn and Chris wouldn?t find a buyer for the store.)
Lynn broke the news to his customers. Some stood there and cried.
Last week, a slick vinyl sign went up, covering the ?Perkins Hardware? sign that had worn two decades of weather. We winced.
Will the new owners understand that being a convenient outlet for drill bits is a tiny fraction of what makes this place important? Will they build a bigger store a mile from downtown, where their sign can be seen from the highway? Is the Perkins Hardware building destined to become one of those country inns that serve swanky waffles and organic coffee?
We hate not being greeted by Lynn Perkins when we?re buying stovepipe. Forever, we had hoped to stand there looking for the little percolator thingy, surrounded by the patter of small towns.
We hope the new people understand. We?d love for the Aubuchon family to move to town, set up behind the Perkins counter, register to vote and come to Town Meeting.
We hope they get it.
Because we know what we stand to lose.
