In the Spring, Bissell’s Pharmacy and Gail’s Stationhouse, two spotlights on Ridgefield’s quintessential Main Street, burned down in the middle of the night. I was in New Zealand, where I read the news in an e-mail, so I didn’t see the gaping hole in the small town facade until June. By that time, both businesses had decided not to rebuild and had hung ribbons and thank-you-signs on the chain link fence that went up around the charred foundations.
Bissell’s was adorable, in it’s time, but it sort of smelled funny and was nowhere near as convenient as the massive CVS branch down the street. I wasn’t sad to see Gail’s go, since I became intimately familiar with what I found to be disgraceful business practices when I worked there for all of eight hours with no break and no tips and almost no paycheck at all last summer.
Now, when I’m home, I drive by the gap in the row of Main Street shops (mostly antique stores and private realtors, with The Gap and a French cafe in the middle) and I don’t bat much of an eye.
This morning, however, Lily made me really miss the idea of the small town pharmacy. I was helping her carry her stuff out to my car on our way back to school, and making the requisite purring noises over her Vera Bradley duffel bag. She said, “Yeah, that is, basically, the best,” even though she had apologized for her Fairfield County luggage when we drove home together for Thanksgiving last year, “it makes me so sad to think of all of them burning away when Bissell’s had that fire!”
I stopped in my tracks on her front walk, the yellow quilted bag slung over my shoulder. Lily looked as though she might regress into a second mourning period.
“And all that Burt’s Bees stuff, too.”
When I admitted that I might have been tempted to dash through flames to preserve such amenities, she just nodded woefully.
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