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     I’m not what you would call a real fisherman, but my Dad took me fishing a few times when I was younger and I always thought it was fun. We never had a boat, but we fished in the Chagrin river and in a few farm ponds near our house. When I got

    Way back in the beginning it says in the Good Book that the apple was Adam’s downfall, and if it would have been me in the garden, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I grew up having two apple trees in our back yard in Chagrin, and I’ve always liked eating them right off

     For those of you who might have been on the moon or something, last Saturday was Halloween. I have many great memories of going out trick-or-treating when I was a kid in Chagrin. We would always carve a pumpkin (and it would get stolen, because of Chagrin’s pumpkin roll) and dress up in

     Well, I mentioned in a provious post that October is scarecrow time here in Burton. Our road repair scarecrow is pretty realistic, but I think that someone made a mistake. Thursday I looked out the front window of the store, and I saw our scarecrow standing there as usual, directing traffic, and right

     Ok folks, this week we have a special bonus post. Can anyone identify this weird flower that we have growing near our cottage. Here’s what we know; It’s a perennial, it comes up in the Spring as leaves only then dies back in the Summer.    In the Fall it comes up again

       Now that it’s mid-October, a chill is in the air, and the frost is definitely on the pumpkin. It’s obvious when you walk through Burton because along the main street you’ll see suspicious characters lurking about that just don’t seem to blink as often as they should.    You see, in Burton October

  A few of you may have noticed last week that I wasn’t around. The store was still open, ably manned by Jared and Paul, but I was not to be seen (and I wasn’t just hiding in the basement as I sometimes do!). Mary Anne and I actually got to go on a week’s

   Last time I talked about fair time here in Burton. Fair time is also a sign that Fall is just around the corner. You can go by the weather forecast or the calender, but at the Old Hardware Store, the surest sign of the change of the season is the increasing sales of mousetraps.

     In Burton, Ohio there are really only two seasons. “Maple Season” at the cusp of late Winter and early Spring, and “Fair Time” marking the end of Summer. Sure there are also early Summer, usually denoted by “Haying Time” and Winter which around here at least, speaks for itself. This is because, if

     One of the given axioms in advertizing is that everyone loves animals. I get a Hardware Industry magazine at work and many of the hardware entrepreneurs they write about have store mascots (mostly dogs or cats) that are prominently featured in their advertizing. I’ve never written about them before, but we certainly have