@polocross58 wrote:When I was young, we owned a country-store. Eleven miles one way to the next town and eighteen miles to another. We stocked everything from horseshoes and farm-gates to a full range of fabrics and embroidery silks. Working there after school and on Saturday, I used to cut cheese from big red waxed rounds, using a contraption you pulled down so that a wire cut the segments. Honey was stored in a huge cream coloured urn-type container on a stand and with its own tap. There was another a bit smaller just for 'candied' honey which some (including me) preferred. Farmers wives would send in their own big jars to be filled. All Australian brands. People would have recoiled in horror if it had been suggested they consume foods (and just about anything else) from overseas
When we bought the shop there were round tins containing a hard pepperminty tablet. Investigation revealed this was an early form of toothpaste. You had to wet the toothbrush and rub it vigorously on the tablet. No idea how long they'd been in stock. Some of the items should probably have been in a colonial museum. We sold blocks of tobacco, hard and dark. The farmers would pare slices off to put in their pipes or chew it and spit and they all had their preferred brands. Stockmen used to hitch their horses outside the pub. The local butcher had big paddocks on the outskirts of town where he kept his own beasts for slaughter. We had a big, wood-burning stove at home, cast iron top. I remember being revolted at having to sizzle massive T-bone steaks on it for my father, knowing the meat had been alive and on the hoof a few days earlier. I refused to eat meat for years -- copped a lot of thrashings for that and for setting a 'stupid example' to younger siblings with my 'pretentious beatnik' notions
We'd moved from the Gold Coast to the country upon buying the store and most of the time I was there, I fancied I hated it. Yet today, I miss the place like mad -- the coolness and quietness, the smell of floor polish, the passionfruit vines, the days that stretched forever, clay tennis courts, straight-forward country kids and taciturn farmers, manure, sunflowers, massive cream sponges wherever you went to visit, the old country picture theatre, miles of empty roads and skies, red dirt and the peace. Yep, just a country bumpkin who gets edgy in big-city shopping centres
What a lovely post. Your descriptive words drew me right in, and I was there in that store, smelling those smells, seeing the things you described so vividly.
