Barb is going

and some will miss her. 

Who is "Barb" you ask? Oh the owner of "that wool shop down near the beach".

Barb has been an institution for more years than most people would care to think about. According to the piece in the paper yesterday she is "pushing eighty". I suspect she is rather older than that. 

Barb had a wool and haberdashery shop in one to the little side streets off the "main street" where I once lived. I knew of it because I had been there. I frequently had to point it out to visitors, especially overseas visitors who wanted something to knit in the summer. I often wonder what they made of her. She was feisty! 

Barb sold wool in balls and skeins and on cones. She sold cheap yarn and expensive yarn. It came in all sorts of colours and weights. Ask her, as I did, for some lace weight yarn and she would argue with you about what lace weight meant and actually was. (She found some under a pile of other things. It was old and too "fragile" to use. She tried to sell it to me anyway - at a reduced price.)

Barb sold buttons, hooks and eyes, snap fasteners, elastic, the knitting needles and needles to sew the knitting up. There were patterns untidily arranged. Barb knew what was there. Some had been there so long they were getting dog eared.  She kept a knitting machine near them and tried to get me to take up machine knitting. I could not get her to understand that, for me, hand knitting was and is therapeutic. I tried to explain that hand knitting is a sort of portable mental health kit but she never understood that.  Barb preferred the machine. I wonder if she will go on with that now she is "retired".

Retiring was not the plan. She tried to sell the business but nobody wanted to buy an old-fashioned business that really kept going because Barb took in the dry cleaning when "that place around the corner" closed. She did repairs too. All the clothing shops along the main street relied on Barb for the sewing on of buttons and the altering of hems or the mending of a badly sewn seam.  

I went in there a number of times but not that frequently. It made no difference. Barb knew me, knew me well. I went on to help my friend P... at craft fairs. Barb did not like craft fairs. She claimed they took away from local business. Perhaps they did but what P... sold would never have appeared in Barb's shop. There I was though helping P or rather one of P...'s customers. Barb stood there and glared at me,

"Come and see me in the shop."

I lived on the other side of the city by then. I never did go back. Perhaps I should have but Barb's shop was untidy, very untidy. I would not have found what I needed there. I am more likely to find an interesting mill end, or bring in something from a remote corner of the world. Now I am not the student teacher looking for something I could afford to use.

Still, I rather like Barb. She is fierce. She definitely does not "suffer fools gladly" but she is one of those "characters" it will be hard to forget. I wonder what that area will do without her. Will people point the shop out and tell their visitors looking for yarn, "Well, there used to be a shop there.."?