Another grand opening has commenced in Ashlandia. A food truck and picnic table are in the parking lot. Couple chairs. Band is setting up under a white canopy on one side of the small lot. Merchandise has been pulled from the store and is displayed on racks and tables. Vintage clothing. Looks like a good turnout.
Third business in that location since I lived here, which is nineteen years. Once upon a time, that place was a bakery called Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Place to go for pies, cookies, breads, turnovers…well, bakery stuff.
Beside it was a small Italian restaurant. Wiley’s World. Excellent food. It’s now a plant store. Across the street used to be a bank but is now a Starbucks. A coffee shop, updated and modern, replaced the old, beloved coffee shop on the corner that went out of business almost ten years ago when the building’s owners upped the rent. And on the other corner was a bowling alley that is now a small strip shopping center that seems to stay half empty.
Then again, I used to walk to this corner to the coffee shop. Just about a mile, every day. When the coffee shop went away, I had to walk further and further till it reached the point that I was consuming too much of my writing day to reach my writing destination and go back home. Then COVID hit and everything shuttered and there was little walking to anywhere.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same” is the expression. The flux of business and life, revealed in the shifting landscape.
Michael Seidel, writer 
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