of their business, the Vidlers aren't sure exactly how many thousands of items (costing up to $50) they have in stock, though they can tell you how many suppliers they deal with: more than seven hundred, an amazing figure for a single store in a village of only six thousand people. Inventory is for tax and insurance purposes, not ordering, which is sight-driven. "We will look at a counter and notice, hey, we're out of merchandise," says Ed. "That's when we know to restock." As for customers' queries, Ed likes to say, "If I don't know the answer, I can always make up a good one!" Kidding aside, who really could keep track of all the beads and bindings in the crafts section, the buttons and thread in the sewing section, the cookie cutters in the housewares section, the peds and hairnets in the personal-notion

section, and the sew-on badges in the Girl Scouts section? Ed knows the answer: "The girls," that's who. The Vidler's staff to thirty-five mostly women - some of whom have worked in the store a quarter-century or longer - are conversant in the cane language of widgets, whatchamacallits, and thingamabobs, right down to the bobbin you need for Mother's 1953 Singer sewing machine or the one-and-a-quarter-inch-wide wick for the kerosene lamp in Uncle Harry's cabin up at the lake. The repair-don't-replace pragmatism of the Depression era hangs tough here. It's reassuring to spot StaZ-ON stove paste, window-screen patches,

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