First to Potter’s to hang a poster. Tim Potter, fourth generation of the general store–owning Potters, is busy stocking shelves. Back when Tim’s dad ran the place, it was filled with useful things like sewing notions and fishhooks. Ed doesn’t fish anymore, so it doesn’t matter so much that young Tim has gentrified the place and no longer carries six varieties of fishing line or bait. Now Potter’s offers specialty foods like mangoes and guava paste, herbed vinegars and extra-extra-virgin olive oils, kalamata olives in fancy jars, costing what he used to spend on a tank of gas in the old days. Bushel baskets are filled with cute replicas of nineteenth-century objects like handmade candles and tin cookie cutters, and old-fashioned and essentially inedible candies like horehound drops. Frankly, Ed thinks, Tim would be better served, in this fairly touristless town, if he provided cell phone chargers and poster board so that people like him wouldn’t have to trek to Wal-Mart. If the leaf peepers ever ventured off the Mohawk Trail this far, then maybe ciabatta bread would sell.

“Can I hang this somewhere?” Ed holds up his homemade poster for Tim to see.

With his hands busy restocking a display of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste, Tim gestures with his chin toward a small bulletin board matted with colored sheets of paper advertising a myriad of activities, yard sales, horses for lease, fund-raising events for the local elementary school and the library. “You’ll have to take something down.”

Ed studies the array before he removes a vintage sheet advertising a concert that took place last year. Commandeering the pushpin, Ed pokes it through the card stock of his sign. His poster is bigger than any of the others and shoves its shoulders across the one for the library bake sale and the one announcing a lecture on recycling coming up at the town hall. Maybe his poster is too big for the few words on it. He never did get a photo to add to the poster. Seemed like too much effort.

Ed takes down his sign and folds it so it’s smaller, then presses the pushpin, which has a broken top and is painful against his thumb. He sucks at the offended digit. Now no one will see his sign, obscured as it is by the clutter of other, more colorful messages. Ed takes his sign down again, scans the board for a better spot, and finally pins his found poster to the very edge, where it sticks out like a dull afterthought. He should have used colored markers.