CHERI ON LAUREL, #2

My absolute favorite stop here was the Laurel Mercantile Scent Library.  This map was behind the cash register.  We all remember the Astoria Settlement (Oregon) and the Florida Treaty . . . don’t we?

While the stock is mostly candles and scents, they are absolutely hugged in by books and shelving; the ladders for reaching highly-placed stock were labeled “For Librarians Only.”

You can't really read the text on this display, but each product has a (presumably) Erin-prepared description of the emotional impact of the individual scents that went into it.

I usually cannot even go into stores that use scents, but this one was a blessed relief; one of the staff members explained that omitting phthalates from the products makes the difference.

Both the Scotsman General Store and the Scent Library had thoughtfully-curated book selections.  The Scent Library also had a lot of vintage books used purely as decoration, a lovely trend that is assisted by the huge numbers of books that get repurposed when not originally sold: 

I will be reading one that they had in both stores, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, by James and Deborah Fallows.

Part of the book description reads: 

“For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have traveled
across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting
dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely
conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation
to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions,
with a practical-minded determination at
dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics.”

Next time we are in the area we might make it to a place called The Junktion (where Mark saw these bike frames), and a once-a-month antiques shop.  (No, I’m not telling you the name.  Finders keepers!)

What is Laurel, Mississippi really like?  Much like the rest of the South . . . and a lot of the rest of the country.  There are nice areas, not-so-nice, a newer commercial strip, an older one, and a downtown.  Two differences stood out to us.  One, there is a larger area of older homes that would have been built for more prosperous people, due to the timber industry.

Two, people care enough here to put their money back into the downtown area.  I realized a while back that some areas that have a lot of modern commerce – and would have met my “Target Rule” for choosing where to live – still have really undesirable downtowns.  It’s much easier to invest in the stock market than it is to invest locally.