Hardware
I glimpsed redemption
while sitting on the wooden floor
of my local hardware store.
Here were rows of useful things
and helpful people to point the way—
hard problems solved with patient wisdom.
Plumbing explained. Plaster illumined.
You can wander the rows of bins,
looking at bits of things that don’t make sense
and you needn’t feel worse for that.
Someone knows what they’re for.
Possibility and hope hover over each spool of rope,
each box of nails.
Hearts lifts with the thought of your life made new—
your failed and broken life fixed up,
duct-taped,
and painted over
so that no one need know you were ever broken.
Rhonda Palmer
Rhonda Palmer
(It's so weird to put a slightly serious poem with this wonderfully odd video, but I like it and hope you do too.)
Hardware stores, the small old fashioned kind that smelled of work and oil and dust --not the big box stores with the echoey ceilings and endless aisles and groceries(!)--is where I sometimes went with my Dad when he had to pick up something or other to fix a problem. While he traded news and jokes with the owners, I wandered the cramped aisles curious about what all the tools and hooks and chains and drawers of screws could be used for. I realized, though, that it was a masculine world, not one that I imagined myself frequenting. I'm happy to say that I've discarded that belief but alas, those small intimate emporiums of my childhood are almost extinct. Melanie Smith
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