For decades, the intersection of Third Avenue and Main Street has been one of Old Town Longmont’s most prominent spots. The corner has featured multiple well-known businesses and just before Thanksgiving, a new retailer joined them: Mystic Sisters, a metaphysical gifts, art and services store.
Owner Eleanor Perreault described how the location is perfect for her. “I fell in love with this building a couple of years ago, but there was someone else in the spot. I knew I needed to be on Main Street and, over time, I persisted. I considered other towns with Main Streets, but nothing else quite worked out. Ultimately I’m where I was meant to be.”
Upon entering, the Victorian feel of the shop becomes an elegant backdrop to the artfully displayed merchandise. That’s intentional. “I looked up information about the metaphysical practices people did in the Victorian Age. They read tea leaves, did palm readings and used crystal balls. I’m learning more about that and focusing on the lighter, positive areas of those practices,” she said.
Perreault named the business Mystic Sisters partly to connect to a shop that her sister runs in Michigan, and partly to signal her belief in female strength and power. “We’re all sisters and we all need to be helping each other and supporting each other. And, as my logo says, we all hold the key. We’re in charge of our own lives. We are always looking on the outside for the answers, but we’re really the ones who have them. (You are) in control of your own life, though a lot of women don’t feel like they are.”
Her journey to open the location came earlier than expected, as she was previously planning to wait until retiring from her current job as the assistant manager of the King Soopers in Boulder. Though the grocery store can keep her busy for as much as 50 hours a week, she felt compelled to start Mystic Sisters when the location became available. Now, she’s working in both places during the week, and her husband is often behind the counter in Longmont.
Though it’s only been open just over a month, Perreault said that her store is “perfect for someone coming in to look for an unusual gift. I have beautiful boxes, driftwood bowls, incense, books and teas that aren’t sold anywhere else on the street. I also order specific kinds of cards, I read oracle cards and I have a beautiful set of instruments to use in raising your vibration or when you’re doing yoga or meditating.”
Perreault is featuring art in her store with displays of carefully crafted stain glass work by medicinal artist Crystal Willet. The pair met when Willett, who operates her own shamanic practice in Longmont, called Singing Cypress, stopped by Mystic Sisters while on a trip to visit galleries.
Her artwork in the store portrays angels and is crafted lovingly with a spiritual process. Willet said that before beginning a piece, she takes a shamanic journey. “I ask what the spirits want to manifest and then those spirits show me their shapes and colors. I create the art from that.”
That level of intention and care is present in many of the shop’s gifts and services and it is consistent with Perrault’s hopes for the shop.
She explained, “the shop is born of love, there’s just goodness. I’m here to help people the best I can. In any way I can. And the new people I’m meeting since I started, they give me energy. It’s wonderful.”
