Why Mama Clark's?

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Come on in. Make yourself comfortable. Let me tell you about my favorite place. 

In the beginning, it was just a back porch on a little house in a small town in northern Alabama, ringed round with tall trees. But later it became a store, lined floor to ceiling with shelves full of fabrics of all thicknesses and colors and patterns. 

On the bosom-fronted counter was a large brown rack of wooden spools of thread and an upright, bronze-colored cash register.  The numbers in its small windows jumped drunkenly up and down with each pushed button and made bright ringing noises like an old pinball machine.

There were drawers layered with zippers and bias tape and ribbons and interfacing. A large glass cabinet displayed buttons of all colors and sizes, with a bank of thin little drawers of more buttons underneath. There were hanging cards of snaps and hooks and eyes.  There were silvery, slivery needles, pins with heads like shoe-button candy, and fat pincushions that looked like overripe beefsteak tomatoes.

In one sunny corner was a table weighed down with pattern books too heavy for a child to lift; McCall’s and Butterick and Simplicity; circled by soft chairs to rest in while paging through them.  Underneath was a basket full of lace ends, fabric scraps, orphaned buttons, empty spools, and tattered magazines for little ones to play with while their mothers browsed and visited. 

At the back of the room was a curtained opening and through it was a small room with a big window with a sewing machine underneath.  Pieces of pinned work in progress lay across the top, and the tiny pinprick of light from the bulb just over and behind the needle glinted off the presser foot. 

Through another curtain just opposite the first, there was a kitchen decorated all around with a border of fat, faded cherries. On the back eye of the stove was a percolator full of thick, bitter Red Diamond coffee.

A tin of teacakes lived in the top right cupboard over the sink, and doughnuts nestled next to cold biscuits in a cherry-fringed metal breadbox below.

On the top wire shelf of the fat, squat old refrigerator was a half-filled pitcher of iced tea. It was brewed and doctored to the color and sweetness of wild honey and stood in a splendor of coolness.

Time, there, was measured by the movement of the sunlight over the lint-dusted wooden floorboards, whether the second or third cup of coffee had gone cold, whether the ice had melted to water in the glasses, or how much there was left, still, to talk about.

That was Mama Clark’s. At least, how I remember it now. Mama Clark’s Kitchen and Back Porch Emporium, I called it.

That was where my mother bought the goods to make our family’s clothes and curtains and bed coverings in my early childhood in the small hours of the sixties. That was where she brought her happiness and worries and ideas to share. And she brought me, her youngest child.

And I brought my curiosity, imagination and memory. 

Then one day it was gone. The whole world of it, gone.  But wherever I went in the rest of the world, I remembered it. And I decided someday I would have a kitchen and back porch emporium to share, of some kind, one way or another. Finally, here it is.

Welcome. Thanks for coming. Come again soon.