Elsewhere
An excerpt from a longer creative non-fiction essay about the Lyme Country Store, New Hampshire, and belonging.
Hello, friends! It has been a few weeks since I’ve published. I’ve been distracted with other projects and transitions — I am on the crest of life’s sine wave over here! This week, I decided to post an excerpt from a larger essay I wrote. This section hones in on one of the places I love most in the world: the Lyme Country Store in Lyme, New Hampshire.
The Lyme Country Store, with its white walls, green shutters, and rocking-chair-laden front porch was New Hampshire rural living. A place for good country people. O’Connor’s salt of the earth. You can tell this in the bikes placed down out front, the cars idling in the parking lot, left on, as their owners run inside for beer, batteries, bait, bacon. In the mini-fridge of “Night Crawlers and Worms” resting next to the baking supplies, the anti-freeze next to the energy drinks, with no one batting an eye at the health concern. In the way you actually choose to bring up the weather at check out. Choose to shove a dollar in the collection can for a new local skating rink. In the brands that it advertises.
A vintage sign for Coca-Cola loops above the flagpole out front. The posterboards of Hood ice cream cones decorate the porch’s columns. Neon pamphlets and flyers collage the corkboard — requesting dog sitters, selling sofas, advertising local plays. A Sharpie-marked wooden beam illustrates the heights of the Pippin family throughout the years, the owners of the shop for two generations. Valentine’s Day cards hang from the wooden rafter, messages from the identical twins who live upstairs. “Happy V-Day, Dad!” they read in large, shaky letters and so I ask their dad, Tony Pippin Jr., if they are current.
“No,” he laughs, flipping an egg on the griddle. “They’re from last year. They don’t care much about me anymore.” Over the years, as I’ve returned to the Lyme Country Store, I’ve watched Tony Pippin Jr. FaceTime his girls as their grandma drives them off to school in the morning. I’ve stood by in the afternoon as they walked the block from Lyme Elementary School to the shop. As they pick out their snacks from the stocked shelves and scurry upstairs to the apartment in which they live. A New Yorker born and raised, I am enamored by the storybook quality, the normalcy of it all.
One day, I ask Tony if he’s ever been to New York City.
He mulls it over. “One time, I took the girls to Central Park,” he responds. I straighten.
“To sightsee?”
“To break the record for the world’s largest parade of tandem biking identical twins.” Later, I looked this up. 173 sets of twins showed up that day, representing all ages and sizes, dressed in a variety of paired, colorful costumes.
He was concerned, he told me, that his twins felt uncomfortable in the world, and so he brought them to identical twin events across America. To the tandem biking parade in New York, to the “Twins Days Festival” held every summer in Twinsburg, Ohio. He felt that if they could see other sets of identical people, they would feel more comfortable with their counterpart. I shifted my gaze away so I could picture it: a tandem bike in a pink tutu on a sunny day.
Wow, just seeing others who are like you can help YOU feel seen. That Tony Pippins Jr sounds like a nice man. 😉 And what love he has for his daughters! Looking up events so that they can see other twins out in the world? Makes me think of my own father.