A place I know ...

... very, very well. Nichols Hardware in Purcellville, Virginia. When I was a little boy my grandfather would take me and my brother Tom there all the time. Then it was a real working hardware store filled with farmers and builders getting their tools and supplies. I was stunned when I went back a few years ago and found that it has not changed. At all. Same creaking wooden floors, same cramped quarters. I even spoke to the clerk who checked me out and discovered that he went to the same elementary school I did in Hamilton just a few classes behind me.

It was almost surreal how little had changed.

But today there is news that one of the co-owners, Ted Nichols, has been killed in a car accident and Nichols Hardware's fate is now uncertain. It has been in business for 97 years.

Here is the article about it from the Washington Post.