Memories of country store tied to idyllic sandy summers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2022 (1390 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We have special places we revisit in memory and in real time. In my late life, I find myself savouring such spaces more often. If I’m lucky, I can share them with others, perhaps through family stories around dinner tables, perhaps because I can take family members back to the sites of actual childhood reverie.

Dipping into the past sometimes feels like a rewilding — a release from the present cares and responsibilities that domesticate us as grown-ups. I am uplifted as I recover the unbroken connection to the carefree days of long ago. Even in difficult childhoods, there might have been such hallelujah times and spaces.

For me, one such place remains as a first love, a rough-and-tumble cottage-country store carefully tended by the legendary, for me, Mr. and Mrs. Greco.

In my heart-and-mind’s eye, I see once more this store, a shack really, composed of blackened, warped barn boards, iced with rusted Coca Cola and Pepsi signs and stapled, tattered paper notices looking for lost cats.

I sift through dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming through off-kilter windows; trail imaginary fingers over dusted produce and dusty dry goods; feel sand-floured feet rubbing against summer-toasted shins; smudge gritty, uneven floor boards; scrutinize a display cabinet curved under a sloping wooden counter, its rich array of penny candy sparkling as gold might within a bank’s vault; and press tight-fisted pennies against the worn edge of a countertop, scored by penknife and pencil.

Legendary among the jack pines, Mr. and Mrs. Greco’s store resides along the cottage-dotted shore — cottages built at the turn of the 20th century, engagingly haphazard in their planning with scrubby add-ons and lean-tos.

Mr. and Mrs. Greco, short and plump, shared smiles travelling between them, glasses perched on noses, their hearts open to our little brigade — brothers, cousin, a next-door friend. I can no longer be sure of the Grecos’ first names, but I want them to be Edie and Jim, and they might well be, for when I say those names in my head — never having spoken them aloud as a child — they seem to be nodding.

The Grecos have run the store for so many years — without them it can never have existed. A pre-Greco period seems impossible, just as any day feels well beyond the reach of boredom, time spent dreaming at the candy counter, scampering over secret forest paths, searching for the cottage kitchen that might take us in for lunch, cavorting, blue-lipped, against the St. Mary’s River’s crisp current.

Early in the morning, before the cottagers awaken to the glory day about to open, Mr. and Mrs. Greco take their battered blue truck into town to pick through the best of newly ripened tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, any kind of fruit in season, never forgetting to restock showcase treats.

Kind and indefatigable, they welcome with warmth and pleasure the scruff of outdoor kids, as knockabout as the store itself, full of hoot and holler, but respectful, too. The store is a place where children’s hand-held change sits on the counter as esteemed as their parents’ paper money. Every day, we are off to buy stuff… sometimes the just-for-us stuff that pocketed pennies can purchase: Dubble Bubble, Primrose Red Raspberries, Sugar Daddy, Wack-O-Wax Lips.

Sometimes we arrive with a dollar or two for homogenized milk, wieners and buns, Wonder Bread if we’ve run our loaf through at breakfast.

The store is not only irresistible because of its inventory and welcome. Sometimes, entire families will sit on car hoods or in the back of trucks to watch a movie shown on the store’s exterior wall, projected onto a huge white sheet never spread tight enough, so film stars wrinkle and fold.

No matter: in such an outdoor cinema, the picture shown holds less magic than stars and moonshine, both celestial and liquid, for there might well be the parent or two with a flask and bowled buttered popcorn.

The rickety store in the woods at the round in the river on its way to Lake Superior owns a rickety dock standing on bent legs, mooring boats made of banged aluminum with dented gas cans, boasting motors on the verge of collapse. Down by the dock, moistened cinnamon sand morphs into finely grained, cement-coloured dustbowl dirt. We track it into the store, into front porches and bunk beds — impossible to manage even with broom and bucket.

These are the storied dirt-and sand-footed summers of my childhood, coated with red licorice Twizzlers and sticky fingers.

Remembered and loved places such as Mr. and Mrs. Greco’s barn-board store led me to a second love affair with the second hand in garage sales and back-alley castoffs: aged wicker chairs with buckling seats; impossibly heavy, wooden Adirondack chairs, cracked but sturdy enough if thickly recovered with royal blue paint; aluminum basins rethought as planters.

In the time of Amazon and the closing of brick-and-mortar spaces, my sleuthing through hand-me-downs and broken bits perceived as good-as-new remains as lively — as concentrated and unbroken — as the memory of penny candy sticking to the fluff inside the pockets of faded summer shorts, a perfectly dispositioned ramshackle store lazing by the river, and the exceptional Mr. and Mrs. Greco who birthed it.

debbieschnitzer@mts.net