You’re gonna be able to have your tarot cards read in front of Ferguson’s General Store before too long, and this bodes either ill or well, depending on your perspective. You buy chicken wire at Ferguson’s, or five gallons of hydraulic oil, or a pound of nails. The old-timers loaf around on the benches outside, and after discussing the weather with them, you go inside and get biscuits and gravy (people still eat biscuits at Ferguson’s.) You can smoke a cigarette while you finish your coffee.

Then I see J* walking in with a basket full of homemade soap – an attempt at that lucrative tourist dollar more effective and more telling than the last attempt: the rack of postcards next to the check-out counter. More and more tourists are travelling the roads around Ferguson’s these days, and more and more city folks are buying the old farmsteads back in the hollers. And they don’t buy chicken wire. They buy home-made soaps and quilts and croissants.

We’ll be seeing hand-made pottery in there before too long – on the same shelf as the pipe wrenches. The crystals will be next to the horse-shoe nails. The incense will be next to the starter fluid.

The populace is in transition, but there’s no telling in what direction it may actually go. A business plan for an organic farm sometimes seems deceptively easy. You lean in whatever direction the smell of patchouli comes from. I used to think I hadn’t hedged my bets very well. Then I found out that S**’s wife loves my salad mix. I bring her some whenever I can. She just pours bacon grease over it and serves it with corn bread.

Maybe I can sell some to the General Store someday. They can put in on the shelf next to the Willie Ferguson tapes. Willie used to live in an old school bus across the road from the store. He’d drink and play fiddle tunes. I used to drink with him, sometimes. He’d never ask me where I was from. He’d just pass the bottle and play another tune. Willie’s dead now. After a few years, they hauled his old school bus off down the road somewhere.