At first glance, the city of Enchanted Springs seems like the kind of place where you’d expect every third resident to burst into song about the power of friendship, all while framed against a charming backdrop of restored brick storefronts and suspiciously cheerful flower baskets. It’s charming, sure — the first twenty minutes you’re there. After that, the sheer saccharine blast starts to hurt your teeth, like sucking on a fistful of Pixy Stix until your frontal lobe buzzes.
That feeling only gets worse if you make the mistake of wandering into the Enchanted Antique Shop.
The place smells like a complicated battle between furniture polish, old books, and an entire shelf of lavender incense no one bothered to light. The floorboards creak. The lighting is suspiciously dim. Every table and chair looks like it could either collapse under a light breeze or be appraised on Antiques Roadshow — there’s no middle ground. Some of the pieces seemed genuinely old, genuinely valuable, and yet priced suspiciously low.
Either the owners are the most clueless appraisers in North America, or there’s a sweatshop full of unpaid art students locked in the back room distressing new furniture with belt sanders and bad intentions. That back room is locked, by the way, hidden behind an ominous, heavy old door with a brass knob that practically radiates secrecy. What’s in there? A hidden cache of Chinese reproductions? Captive laborers spinning faux-history under threat of vintage knitting needles?
Eleanor, the retired proprietor, still holds court from a threadbare rocking chair near the front counter, crocheting cat-shaped amigurumi animals with yarn that may or may not have been spun from actual cat fur.
Speaking to Eleanor is an exercise in navigating quantum uncertainty; conversations drift in and out of topic and timeline with the grace and predictability of a punctured weather balloon. Ask about a Victorian fainting couch, and you’ll somehow end up hearing about her uncle’s prized bull, the Great Depression, and why you should never trust a man who plays the harmonica before lunch. By the time you stagger away, clutching your sanity like a shredded umbrella in a hurricane, you’ll be lucky to remember why you walked in to begin with.
Marley Montgomery is the shop’s current proprietor. She’s a young redhead with the perpetually wide-eyed look of someone who signed up to pet-sit a goldfish and instead inherited a pack of feral wolves. I’ll give her credit: she does her best to keep the place running. She’s cheerful. She’s earnest. She’s also profoundly out of her depth. She wanders around the shop, looking like she’s been swallowed whole by the slow, cheerful madness of Enchanted Springs and hasn’t realized it yet.
The one saving grace of the whole experience was the complimentary sugar cookies (of course), courtesy of the Enchanted Oven Bakery across the street — crisp on the edges, chewy in the middle, and just barely enough snap to restore the will to live after a conversation with Eleanor or her young protege.
Visit if you must. Take a complimentary cookie. Smile politely at the crocheted cats. Then back slowly toward the door before you get swetp up in the maelstorm, too.