The Milpower Chronicles

Eleanor Gustoff was a friend of mine all the way up until she started knitting with licorice. It wasn’t that trying new materials for children’s pullovers was such a bad idea, and it wasn’t even that a whiff of licorice is enough to make me swell up like an unmilked cow at noon. 

It was more, I think, that Eleanor decided to borrow my knitting bag that day– my very favorite knitting bag-- the one I had bought on vacation in Scotland. It had a silk-screened picture of Elvis in Lerwick on it, and he was wearing a fair-isle vest. She drove off with it and then just plain left it in the back window of her black Datsun 320B while she made sno-cones at the Knittin’ Pretty booth at the Quip County fair in mid-August. That might itself have been forgiveable, except that I had just purchased a bag of handmade glass beads to use in a special lace scarf for old lady Gismore’s 105th birthday, and they were in that bag. (Old lady Gismore had been considered a tramp in her younger days, but the Milpowers had stood by her and she had stuck around town despite her reputation.) By the time the last sno-cone was sold that hot day, the Gismore beads and Gustoff licorice were engaging in such sticky, filthy, incredibly revolting relations that I felt sure even old lady Gismore would not have approved.

Up until that fateful day, however, Eleanor and I had done a lot together. It was her idea, for example to convert an old A&W root beer stand down at the south end of Farinough’s main drag into a drive-in yarn shop and compete head-to-head with Hanks & Hammers down the street. Since it was her idea I felt honor-bound to let her work there, even though it was the money I got from my divorce settlement that got us started. The way we figured it, if we didn’t have to put yarn out on fancy shelves then that saved a lot of work and a lot of money buying shelves and making things look pretty. We wouldn’t have to put up with little kids all over the place, and customers wouldn’t need to get out of their bathrobes in order to go shopping for yarn.

We painted the outside of the stand a beautiful chartreuse with purple trim and installed little speakers that we got from the old closed drive-in movie theatre out on Highway 200. The only problem with that was that we could talk to the knitters in their cars but they couldn’t talk to us. So we’d walk out to the car when somebody pulled up, and ask what they were looking for. They’d tell us, and we’d go back into the shop and tell them what we found from inside and ask if they wanted to see it. A nice big nod or shake of the head from them saved us the trouble of running out to hear what they said, and from then on, they were expected to use sign language of one sort or another to keep us from having to run in and out too terribly much.

We named our drive-in The Fleece Boll – you know, cause we sold cotton and wool—and pretty soon had quite the clientele built up. Oh sure, there were always the times when some out-of-towners would mistake us for a hamburger stand and pull up hungry expecting to order food and all, but you’d be surprised how many of them we could convert to knitting in a hurry. If it was a woman or a family, Eleanor would go out lookin' all maternal and stuff, but if it was men then I’d take a turn. That was back when I had a figure that was talked about and it wasn’t in my bank account.

Mostly, though, the paneled station wagons would pull up and one knitter would get out of her car and get in with another knitter and they’d just sit and knit and chat and ask for the occasional viewing of a new color or kind of yarn. Because of the novelty of the shop, it was best for us to be open early in the morning and late at night., and that is what finally got us into deep water trouble.

Posted by Sheila at February 3, 2003 05:03 PM Posted to Stories | TrackBack