The summer before my junior year of high school, I went to my best friend's house, picked her up, and we headed to pick up on application for a craft store that was opening up in town.
We were hired that summer, and we started at the store before it opened. For two weeks, we worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., setting up the store.
It's kind of shocking to be 17 (or maybe it was 16? I forget), not really working, to working 12-hour days for two weeks straight. I still remember how swollen my feet were at night when I got home from standing on hard tile floors all day.
While we were setting the store up, my department (Home Accents) was tasked with putting lamps together. All of the lamps you see at the store? They don't come pre-assembled. For three days straight, we put lamps together. For 12 hours each day.
To this day, I'm still pretty good with lamps.
Life happened, and I left for college, quit that job, came back and worked at the store again, and then finally graduated and found my 'real' job and career.
For a while, in between moving to many, many different cities in as many years, I got really homesick. Wherever I lived, whether it be Kansas or Oklahoma, all I had to do to feel 'at home' was to walk into any location of this chain craft store.
The aisles were familiar to me. I knew where everything was, and in the midst of living in a new town and the stresses that come with changing jobs, there was comfort in the craft isles and, particularly, in the fabric department.
I had spent so many hours, days and years working at the craft store that walking into one instantly felt like home. When I had an internship in a large city in another state, I would go into the craft store by my apartment just to feel like something in my life made sense.
I knew where everything in the store was located. It was home to me.
In high school, my Dad dressed up as a blind man for Halloween. He made a harness for our 110-pound family dog as a seeing-eye dog. My Dad came into the store, with his big sunglasses on and his seeing eye dog in hand, and asked for me by name. (I think the employees at the front of the store actually believed he was blind.)
I saw my Dad and dog from the back of the store, in the fabric department where I spent my time, and I immediately marched back to the stockroom to hide.
My manager loved it and brought up how red my face got for the rest of my working time there.
There's something to be said about one of your first jobs in life. Jobs like that teach you, especially tennagers, about being accountable, being on time, becoming friends with co-workers and going to Christmas parties.
The store where I learned those lessons? The four walls where I learned that I was afraid of ladders and heights? The store where I wished more than anything that I would one day get paid for what I loved to do, which was writing?
The store where I encountered countless customers asking me to go get something "from the back," the store where I questioned how customers think the back of the store is some black hole full of products instead of just a place to dump trash, compact boxes and unload trucks?
That store announced it was closing earlier this month.
To be honest, I expected it to happen. When the same company opened a store with a brand new building 50 miles away a few years ago, I knew the writing was on the wall for my hometown's store.
I'm not going to pretend I know Corporate America's reasoning behind this decision, because I don't. I'm not even going to try to understand it.
I'm not even going to walk into that store before it closes, either, because I'm not in the mood to go to a funeral of something I once loved.
I don't want to see depressed employees (one of whom worked there when I did and has been there since the beginning, 17 years ago) and I don't want to see empty shelves.
I want to remember it in all its glory, like the time I was so swamped on a Black Friday that bolts of fabric were stacked taller than me on my table. That holiday, I gave up trying to clean my department. I just remember my manager walking past me that night when we closed, with a mess everywhere, and me telling him that I didn't want to talk about it.
A random note about fabric: To this day, I still get irritated when people get fleece and flannel mixed up. It's one of my major pet peeves. Also, I hate gingham.
Eventually, I might get over it and shop at the store 50 miles away. Or I might just boycott them entirely and shop elsewhere.
But, man. The hurt runs deep with this one. We're mourning a death, and it will be a while before that hurt subsides.
