Friday Shoot-Out: My Favorite Place to ________

The idea of the My Town Shoot-Out is to post photos of your local community every Friday. This week's assignment was chosen by Cindy from Alaska. She left it open, and I decided to finish it like this:

My Favorite Place to Buy Nuts and Bolts

All photos shot in Corvallis, Oregon.

I guess it has been over three years now since this town got a big-box hardware store called Lowes. Once we hit 50,000 people, suddenly we were of interest to businesses like that, attracting a huge Safeway, and a K-Mart superstore. That makes a place like Robnett's Hardware, located downtown, with its creaky hardwood floors and serpentine aisles, seem special.

Feeling vulnerable, last year they decided to stay open on Sundays to be competitive with Lowes. Really though, there is no comparison. Robnett's has been in the family for decades, and Lowes can't look the same, sound the same, smell the same, or be the same experience.

Lowes isn't mustard-yellow, but Robnetts is.

Lowes wouldn't even know what this is.

Lowes doesn't stash old Energizer bunnies on top of a not-for-sale refrigerator.

If Lowes has these chains, they don't look so cool.

That goes for the ropes too.

At Robnetts you get the urge to put up a fence, maybe two fences.

I am drawn to the knobs and handles in ways I can't explain.

I really like the Fastener Center....

...because it has about 3 billion little drawers with stuff in them.

There are shelves and shelves of things you probably shouldn't do without, and ladders to reach everything.

In one of the rooms they have this coke machine. It still works! It has cold bottles of Coke in it, but they don't cost 10 cents anymore. You have to ask for assistance--and there is actually someone who will help you.

Did I mention that the exterior is mustard yellow?

Hardware

by Ronald Wallace

My father always knew the secret
name of everything—
stove bolt and wing nut,
set screw and rasp, ratchet
wrench, band saw, and ball—
peen hammer. He was my
tour guide and translator
through that foreign country
with its short-tempered natives
in their crewcuts and tattoos,
who suffered my incompetence
with gruffness and disgust.
Pay attention, he would say,
and you'll learn a thing or two.

Now it's forty years later,
and I'm packing up his tools
(If you know the proper
names of things you're never
at a loss) tongue-tied, incompetent,
my hands and heart full
of doohickeys and widgets,
whatchamacallits, thingamabobs.

"Hardware" by Ronald Wallace from Time's Fancy. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.