jewelry repair kit

A customer asked us to fix an earring for her so I pulled out our rarely used jewelry repair kit. It's a candy tin with some earring wires and backs in it. .. and a tattered piece of paper taped to the lid that made me smile. I recognize the hand of Sarah, a former employee and now good friend; she probably made it twenty years ago. Her spidery handwriting and her little drawings: a crying woman wearing a cowboy hat saying "oh no, my earring" and a smiling woman holding the kit saying "don't worry!" It makes me remember my visits to the store in New York that I worked in when I was in my twenties - the store that was part of my inspiration for starting this one. Some twenty years after I left they were still using signs I had calligraphed and it always gave me a start to recognize my own faded handwriting. Now it's happening here. Sometimes we'll unearth an old piece of stock and I'll recognize the writing of Deb, or Emily, Danielle, or Peter. Then I know the item has been around a little too long, yet I get to enjoy how it reminds me of the person who wrote it and their time here. We briefly tried a price gun here, many years ago. I hated the way the tags looked. And the thing about handwriting; no computer or price-gun generated tag would have the ability to evoke the past in the same way.