Retail artifacts

That my grandparents lived in a funeral home was a slightly odd but mostly accepted piece of childhood. That the house had also contained a store about a decade before I was born was a piece of childhood fascination. My mother talked of minding the shop and slicing meat for customers, and that old meat slicer stood along the wall in a room that held musty old toys that we grandkids played with when we visited.

The idea that an insignificant rural crossroads like Honey Grove, Pennsylvania, could be home to a grocery store seemed impossibly quaint and old-fashioned to my young mind. And like so many other stories I heard of the time before my arrival, I associated this general-store era with ancient history, further evidence that my parents and grandparents were really, really old. Only with the perspective of adulthood do I realize that this era was not long at all before my own.

My grandfather took over the store in Honey Grove when he was 24. He ran it along with the new funeral home he founded when he moved from Harrisburg to the old family home to start his life. It had been J.M. Long’s store before that, belonging to my grandfather’s uncle. I think.

Up the road in the larger but still tiny town of East Waterford stood another store, Patterson and Henry, that was also in the family. That store was known to my generation as Long’s Community Store–still operating today, but in a different building, replaced after some damned drunk slammed into the vintage streetside gas pump and caught the whole thing on fire.

By the time I arrived in this world, the Pattersons were dead, the Honey Grove store was a showroom for caskets, and people bought their groceries at Weis in Mifflintown. The tiny stores dotting the countryside, selling gas from a streetside pump and Hershey’s ice cream and serving as gathering places for men they called the “loafers,” were closed. I missed that era by just this much. But I have a few leftover items in my collection of papers, including butcher’s tape, envelopes, receipt paper, tags, and contracts. They’re faded and yellow, but they’ve long outlived the store–and people–they served.