SMALL TOWN SHOPPING
My sweetheart seems impressed when, every Christmas, I manage to get her the perfect piece of jewelry and I’ve been a little surprised myself. I mean I am not known for my sense of fashion, neither are the subtleties of composition at all apparent to me and I certainly don’t do well with colors. And yet, for twenty-two consecutive Decembers, I have perused the fine assortments at Windhorse Arts for just the right pair of earrings or necklace or bracelet or some combination and have always managed to lovingly wrap and then present on Christmas morning, precisely the right item. It does help enormously that I can consult confidently with proprietor Alison because she keeps such meticulous records that she can reliably remind me—and has on several occasions—that a piece I might be lingering over is one I’d already gifted, years earlier. “Yes,” she once said, only glancing at her notes, “You were in on December 12 in 2007 and picked up those same earrings and a matching necklace.” I’ve always appreciated Alison’s helpfulness but this year the lights went up on what had been her vastly more conspiratorial involvement. I’d selected a necklace and earrings a few weeks earlier and tucked them in my desk drawer intending, as usual, to wrap them a day or two before Christmas and put them under the tree but on Christmas Eve Day, I found I had only a bracelet. The fact that I’d bought earrings and a necklace but now had only a bracelet was lost on me but not, oddly, the fact that I’d bought two things and now had only one. I hurried down to Windhorse and went in, holding the box containing the bracelet and with what was surely a puzzled look on my face. “I’m baffled,” I said as I walked toward the counter.
“Uh Oh, you’re onto me,” she replied.
It seems I had, in fact, bought earrings and a necklace but Alison had wrapped and charged me for something—less expensive as it happens— she felt Elaine would enjoy more. Furthermore, this wasn’t the first time Life in a small town is often very helpful.