I don’t know why this store caught my eye as I was driving home from work last week. Stores of this sort are ubiquitous in the central city. Each has such a strong personality, such a distinctly individual character, especially compared with the chain furniture stores found in suburban shopping districts. There’s harmony in the sameness of the suburbs, but also emptiness. At the same time, the exuberance I find so attractive in these mom-and-pop stores starts to feel messy and chaotic, even claustrophobic, within the crowded century-old neighborhoods of the city where they’re found.

Contradictory, I know. I’m the town mouse and the country mouse all rolled up into one package. Except the “town” mouse of Aesop’s fable is elegant and sophisticated. Maybe the part of me that loves these stores is more of an “urban” mouse?

But looking strictly at the photo in addition to the subject itself, and I know this is a small and somewhat ridiculous thing, I love how when I cropped the image to leave out a useless swath of asphalt marred by reflections from my car window, it turned out that the little patch of sky in the upper right-hand corner is so pale it looks white, as though I’d decided to clip out the sky. I love the resulting “jog” in the frame. It kind of pairs nicely with the store’s haphazard presentation in real life😀

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