||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||
Orcasian shopping trips always take a lot longer than you think they will, because, at Island Market, you see everybody you know. If you see someone you know, well, of course you have to stop and chat. After all, you haven’t seen him or her for almost a week, and there’s lots of catching up to do. So you both stand there, in the middle of an aisle with your half-full shopping carts, and you chat, and the time passes. After a while, you realize that it’s getting late, so you move on, but then you meet another friend, and the whole thing starts all over again. It’s a wonder that you ever get out of the market at all.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Island Market was a general store called Templin’s Fair. It occupied a small wood-frame building on the south side of Main Street for a while, and then it moved to a larger place at the corner of Main Street and North Beach Road. You might wonder whether that move was necessitated by the shoppers who congregated in its aisles even back then, chatting idly and taking up both space and time.

As the Orcas Island community continued to grow, Templin’s General Store grew with it, finally expanding, in 1977, into the then-brand-new building that we know as Templin Center, where Ray’s Pharmacy now is. While Orcasians do occasionally chat in the aisles of Ray’s Pharmacy, somehow those talks are never quite like the prolonged, mid-aisle meetings we celebrate at Island Market. Perhaps that’s because Ray’s doesn’t provide four-wheeled shopping carts to lean upon, to help us more comfortably discuss the week’s doings and the people who aren’t there to object to what we’re saying about them.

Today’s Island Market was built in about 1993, complete with aisles wide enough to allow two shopping carts to pass each other, or, rather, narrow enough for two people to block completely while chatting. We know about this last because, like most of the rest of you, we’re guilty of having done it. Frequently. But that’s OK, we say to ourselves, because this is Orcas Island, and we’re all operating on laid-back “island time.” If you’re in a hurry, maybe you should be in Friday Harbor, the big city, instead.

We were at Island Market just a couple of days ago. In the process of finding everything on our fairly extensive shopping list, we met, and stopped to talk with, one neighbor, three other friends, the plumber who had recently repaired our water heater, and the Paramedic who had saved me from exsanguination-by-nose only a couple of weeks previously. In other words, it was just the usual Orcas Island shopping trip.

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