O’Dear

I am not a scrap-booker or a paper-crafter. The intricacies of cutting and pasting tiny scraps of paper onto one another make my impatient hands quiver, and the cuteness of all things scrapbooky makes me groan. To be honest about it, my mom has a gift with this stuff though, and I enjoy watching her work.

She took me along Saturday for a trip to O’Dear, a paper crafting store in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri. I’d heard her talk about this place as if it were the pinnacle of small town craft suppliers, so I was beyond surprised to find that O’Dear sits a few hundred yards off of Highway 32, down a rough gravel road, in a field, in the middle of nowhere.

Long Gravel Road, photo by smalltowngirl

I made a quick pass through the store before heading back outside to sit on a bench and watch a tractor drive up and down the road, smoothing the gravel. The skies were some of the most beautiful skies of the summer, and I was content to sit beneath them in the warm August sun while my mom shopped for paper crafting supplies inside.

It’s not just cutesy moms who shop at O’Dear. On Saturday, a Harley Davidson sat parked on the gravel outside the store, complete with two black leather-bound riders and two helmets covered in bumper stickers saying things like “Free the Boobies” and “It’s a Sick World and I’m a Happy Guy.”

Free the Boobies, photo by smalltowngirl

“Happy Guy” Harley rider shared my bench for a few minutes for a smoke break while his wife finished their shopping inside.

I had witnessed this intimidatingly tough-looking, leather glove-wearing, poney-tailed dude excitedly commenting on “cute” scrap booking paper inside the store moments before, and I grinned, thinking about the absurdity of life in Small Town, Missouri.

Where else could I sit a quarter mile down a crooked gravel road, ten miles from anywhere, talking to a guy who wears “Free the Boobies” bumper stickers on his head at a store selling scrap booking supplies?

O'Dear, photo by smalltowngirl

O’Dear is, from what the scrap bookers in small town Missouri tell me, a wonderful scrap booking supply store. O’Dear is located somewhere down Highway 32, between Farmington, Missouri and I-55 in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri. Store hours vary a bit, but the store is typically open Monday through Friday from 9-4:30 and Saturday from 10-3:30.