ACE Is the Place
Or, Let's Try This One More Time. (No. 90)
Back in ’95, when I first rolled into Huntersville, you didn’t need a GPS to find a carriage bolt. We had an ACE Hardware sitting right across from the post office, and a True Value parked where the kids’ museum is now. In those days of minimal traffic around a virtually non-existent “downtown,” a Saturday afternoon trip for nails or a paintbrush might take less than 15 minutes. Then, a year later, Lowe’s Home Improvement dropped a store a few miles up I-77, and it was like a frost hitting a summer garden. The ACE folded pretty quickly. That True Value, though, hung on until the calendars flipped to the new millennium, finally locking the doors around 2001.
Back then, I didn’t mourn the loss much. To be honest, I was half-giddy at the prospect of those massive warehouse aisles, the smell of infinite kiln-dried lumber, and enough garden supplies to green up the whole county. But time has a way of buffing the shine off a big-box store. Somewhere between the traffic jams and the quarter-mile hike just to find the mouse traps, I started to miss the “hometown” of it all. I missed the place where the guy behind the counter didn’t just know where the washers were—he knew your name and probably which leaky faucet you were trying to fix.
So, I’ll admit to a genuine spark of joy hearing that a new ACE is taking root in the Food Lion Plaza on Gilead Road. People ask if it’ll survive where the others didn’t. Well, Huntersville isn’t that sleepy outpost of 10,000 souls anymore. We’ve grown into a small city, for better or worse. The folks living around that plaza have quadrupled in number, and a lot of them have traded in their work boots for something a bit more polished. For my money, a three-mile hop down Gilead, even with its crazy diverging diamond traffic, beats getting swallowed whole by the vortex over near Birkdale every time I need a pint of satin finish.
Sure, it won’t have the forest of lumber or a sprawling nursery. But that’s fine. I can still wander over to Dearness Gardens for a rhododendron, and 84 Lumber is right on the way to the community garden. I’m not saying I’m done with the big warehouses for good, but I can see a future where my visits there are occasional chores rather than weekly pilgrimages—where the hardware store feels like a neighbor again, and not just a destination.
On another note, my new novella, The Two Dollar, is officially out in the wild on Amazon today. It’ll be a free download through Saturday, March 21st. It lives in the same world as my NC-set Owen Sinclair mysteries, but this time following fly-fishing guide Cal Moon down to the Bahamas to lend a hand to an old friend. Naturally, things get sideways—as they generally do when I’m holding the pen. It’s a quick read, about an hour’s worth of storytelling. Give it a look-see and let me know if it rings true for you.
