Alternative Universe

Today, our lives have adopted such a blurring pace that folks now outsource parts of their lives or just neglect them altogether. And horse owners are certainly not immune from this acceleration. But fortunately we have a quick remedy for these times where even reminders to brush our hair need to be written on a list, lest we forget. The local feed and tack store offers an injection of solace and simpler times unavailable to our non-horse counter-parts. I like to think of it as yes, a place that drains my bank account, but also a mental oasis.

See, here's the profundity of feed stores: time stands still there. Just last week, I found myself fiddling with a multi-tiered chicken feeder one moment and then looking at squishy bottles to feed baby calves the next. Everything I fondled seemed devoid of any relevance to our modern times. It was grand! I inhaled deeply the old-fashioned smell combining oats, rubber footwear, and caged Angora rabbits in a nearby corner. I recollected moments with the exact same ingredients in various times and feed stores throughout my life, at 6 years old, 12, 15, in my 20s. Nothing ever changes in these places. Nothing. Being inside a tack and feed store is so delightfully timeless and technologically deficient that a person can actually forget about cell phones, text messages, day planners.

In fact, if a person were to spend an abundance of time in these wonderlands, her bonds with modern day reality would loosen pretty swiftly. Spending all that time surrounded by hand-held scythes, garden seeds, and livestock troughs can skew someone's perception of which century we're in. From inside a feed store, you might easily assume everyone led a homesteading lifestyle, driving their horse and buggy to market and raising hogs at home. You'd think that everyone in your mostly urban surroundings knew what to do with the oddities I played with last week: four types of chicken scratch, a sleek magnet for pulling nails from cows' bellies, bags of sodium chloride, seed potatoes.

It's definitely not your average retail browsing experience, though feed stores are predictable and that's what comforts me. Ironically like McDonald's and Starbucks, every feed store in every town across America is nearly identical except for small differences in floor plans. They all seem to have a senile old cat curled up by the cash register, a quirky fellow (or gal) behind the counter who has lived in the same town a lifetime and knows every scrap of historical lore. They all have stacks of free agricultural magazines by the front door and fly catchers hanging from the ceiling. There's a guy out back who divides his time between loading sacks of grain into patrons' trucks and flirting with women in the bird seed aisle. His sidekick divides his time between loading hay bales and napping. Some of the store aisles will be laden with cans of brass polish and leather dye so old and dust-covered now that they qualify as antiques. And no feed stores I know follow normal business practices like sales, promotions, or customer appreciation days. Nope, they all just keep marching along to their own never-changing beat.

The feed store of my youth-- Braley's Feed in Randolph, Vermont-- was a high point for me when Dad took me along on Thursday mornings. During my decade of visiting Braley's, the scene inside remained unchanged. Braley himself, grandson of the original founder, wore a long sleeve white thermal shirt under denim overalls no matter the season. He always lingered near the front of the store, flanked by four or five local farmers that came in every morning around 7am for the hot coffee and fresh glazed donuts that Braley set out between the Farmer's Almanac stacks and display rack of gardening gloves. Their conversation lasted the duration of a glazed donut for each, or approximately enough time to comment on the weather, their hay crop, and the maple sap flow. Extra agenda items included the idiocy of members of the local select board.

Initially, I loved Braley's because of the glazed donuts. Then, over the years, I began to savor the scene. The brown braided rug by the front door occupied by a three-legged black Labrador, the way Braley wrote out receipts with pencil and paper even long after the invention of computers, the cluster of farmers or wanna-be farmers leaning against his counter with a cup of hot coffee and no other place in the world to be at that moment. The lazy conversation and Braley's opinion (he had one for everything) about the best type of salt minerals for livestock. The boxes of peeping fuzz balls in the spring that would grow into chickens by autumn. As I grew up and changed, Braley's remained the same, which in time endeared the place to me. It somehow made the store more precious and trustworthy to me in a world quickly becoming fleeting, changing, or deceptive. Braley's is in fact still operating in Randolph, Vermont in the same location, and probably with the same handwritten paper receipts, although it's a younger generation of Braley now writing them with pencil.

Last week, after spending more time than I realized in the feed store and pondering the purchase of nostalgic items I didn't really need like little cans of Bag Balm, I wandered slowly out to my car. A very busy day lurked ahead of me and, yes, I should have been moving at a franctic pace. Instead, though, I meandered. I clung to the slow rhythms of our local feed store here and thought about finding uses for a hand-held scythe. A noise startled me once I got back in my car. My cell phone rang from the passenger seat and due to my temporary time warp, I wondered aloud "What the heck is that thing?"