Last Friday I spent the day with one of my oldest friends, Sue...celebrating her birthday, we went exploring...right in our own backyard...
We drove up to Anacortes, a small town on Puget Sound that is surrounded by water and forests...
After scoping out the northern park for future hikes and camping locations, we enjoyed walking main street, poking around the shops and eating lunch. One last stop before we left town was the local marine and hardware store...Anacortes has an active marine industry - both fishing and boat building/repair...the store was in an old wooden building, close to the pier and filled with modern gear as well as old relics...it was the old relics that drew my attention...
The striped straps immediately caught my eye...with those corroded metal shanks, I just had to have them...
I picked up a blue stripe and a green stripe one...they may show up as straps on an artist smock...
There were boxes of cotton boot socks...essentially light cotton footies that I assume would protect your foot before you put on heavier socks and then your boots...? One of the boxes was empty...except for pieces of string and the labels that had been on the boot socks - it seemed that the labels had been loosely tied on and eventually lost from the original socks. Being a sucker for typography and ephemera, I loved these labels...especially with the red number indicating the size...I grabbed up a handful along with my striped straps...
The weathered men at the front counter look like they had just come in from a morning of fishing...but were pleasant to the two of us who obviously had no boat for which we needed supplies. As I laid down my wares, I figured that they would laugh at me for wanting the discarded labels and include them for free with the price of the straps...but the one gentleman called over the owner to ask for a price...
I learned that the Oswego Company was a local institution that manufactured these socks, Oswego once being a prominent family in town. As the socks were packaged up for shipment, a couple of the workers, who were women, included hand written notes with each order. Through the years they heard back from some of the men - one was in a prison in California, another a fisherman in Alaska...I could see that I had ignited a spark...and could easily have received an earful of local history...but in the end, was charged a little over a dollar for a dozen labels which I cheerfully paid. As we walked down the street, back to the car and the trip home, my friend expressed surprise that I was charged anything at all...and I explained, that I paid for the pleasure of the story...willingly...
