An Imagination at Work

Miss Rita Rose & Joanne Rossman

There are people in our lives who inspire us to bloom like wild-headed peonies, to wear the outrageous hat with the wires and feathers, to drop everything and head for Paris, to rent the red convertible, to give away the living room rug and replace it with a threadbare Persian, to put up our own cumin-spiced pickles.

If we’re really lucky, people like this become our friends. I’m really lucky. Joanne Rossman is my friend.

I met her years ago, when I donned my best dancing petticoat and Maytag shoes and stood on the doorstep of her store at #6 Birch Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. She  had sounded so nice on the phone, but I was nervous…I had a basket of Story Pictures to show her that no one (short of my sisters and a few friends) had seen. This was my first sales call and selling is not my forte. But the minute I saw the store window, I knew that sale or no sale, I had stumbled into Wonderland.

If you’ve not seen Joanne’s store, you might want to give your imagination a tonic and take a look at her website: www.joannerossman.com. This little shop is as captivating as it is quirky, as mysterious as it is playful…a wildly eccentric mix of Buddhas and ravens and cowgirls and old paintings and candles that smell like wood smoke. Ribbons and sticks and fountain pens and notebooks and stones and clay pots and fabrics from all over the world. Books you’ve never seen before and beautiful socks and tiny ancient ottomans. There is even a resident pug: Miss Rita Rose, who regally presides over this kingdom, has been rumored to occasionally sport a tutu, and often runs the ka-jinging old cash register.

And then, there is Joanne, who greets everyone with a smile and a heartfelt, “Hello, Darling!” Even if she has never seen you before, you’re still one of her darlings simply because you’re in her world now…and everything you see around you has been chosen by her, filtered through her splendid imagination, and original, marvelous sense of wonder.

We hunger for places like this in our on-line world, in our box store uniformity. Places that bring us back to childhood when the first snow took our breath away and Santa could make it down any chimney or up any fire escape or even let himself in the front door.

Joanne calls herself, “The purveyor of the unnecessary and the irresistible.” I agree with the irresistible part, but as for the unnecessary, I think that Joanne and the gift she gives us all is as necessary to our spirit as sunlight to our bones. A sparkling imagination at work, full force, nourishes us with reminders that each of us, in our own way, has the capacity to soar.