Living and loving a life that would make her father proud

When you listen to Beth Ressler, you begin to believe that the rolling cadences of her soft speech — the sound of southern Virginia just north of the North Carolina border — are somehow shaped by the soft hills of that land, where she grew up.

Beth Ressler JIM MCLAUGHLIN / FLORIDA WEEKLY There isn't a prettier English, there may not be a prettier American landscape, and there aren't many prettier stores than Ms. Ressler's boutique on Fifth Avenue South.

In appearance, Wind in the Willows is a far cry from the Danville, Va., of Ms. Ressler's her youth, although her roots lie just under the surface. Mostly she offers upscale women's clothing that reflects the keen fashion judgment trained into her during her years as a buyer for the Ivy stores, when she spent a lot of time in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

On one of those trips, while held up momentarily by a metal detector with a Michigander named Dan Ressler, her life was suddenly changed.

"He said, 'Why don't you change your boarding pass and sit with me?' I said, 'If you want to sit with me, you change your boarding pass,'" Ms. Ressler recalls, chuckling.

Ten days later he proposed, and she said yes. Although the couple was divorced in 2003 after almost two decades of marriage, they remain both friends and attentive parents to their 19-year-old adopted daughter, Bethany, who was born in Korea.

That story tells a lot about Ms. Ressler, and about her heart. "I told Dan years ago that I'd always wanted to adopt an Asian child, ever since I saw these little orphaned children coming off a plane after the Vietnam War," she explains.

And her store — the part that isn't exclusively clothing — tells a lot about her own witty love of the world's charms, exhibited in a cornucopia of unpredictable gifts or icons.

"I feel like, if I can't sell a customer a jacket or pair of pants, maybe they'll buy a dress for their granddaughter, or a magic wand, or a book (she's the No. 1 seller in the United States of the "Eat Your Peas" series). I have stuff everywhere, hanging from the trees, hanging from the ceiling — everywhere."

Just under that contemporary Neapolitan cast, however, lies the "small-town country girl," as she puts it.

Her attentive, intense devotion to her boutique — her seven-day-per-week work ethic, her sense of fairness and fun and giving good value, her independence — all spring from her desire to be like her father and mother, she says.

When she was very young, her parents opened the Continental Food Shop in Danville. For a while, life was almost perfect, she remembers.

"He was a meat cutter who worked for A&P, then he opened his own little store. My mom made the pimento cheese and salad and pies… and my dad would cut the meat. There were four of us kids, and I was the only one who loved the business, ever since I was a little bitty thing.

"I rode my bike down to the store. My mom and dad put a little Coke crate up to the counter so I could ring up sales at the register. I delivered groceries, I bagged them, I ran the snowball machine, and after my dad cut meat, I would clean off the counter."

The family lived in a 26-room house in Danville that was built in 1900 from granite hauled in on horse-drawn wagons. The four kids shared one room; to bathe, they all had to walk over to the YMCA, since her parents rented the upper floors, with the bathrooms, to students. Now a vital 82, her mother, "Mama Ruth" Callahan, still lives in that house, and her sisters and brothers also remain Virginians.

But Ms. Ressler's ideal childhood came to a halt in the fall of her 13th year, in the last hour of the last day of hunting season, when her father was shot and killed by a 16-year-old boy who mistook him for a deer. He was 36.

"My dad knew something was going to happen," she recalls. "He had been at his store just before that, and torn off a corner of meat packing paper and written his will. They found it in his pocket. My dad had a little Triumph sports car he loved, and he took it around the block before he left, and he came in and said to my mom, 'If anything ever happens to me, I'll always love you.'"

After that tragedy, says Ms. Ressler, "I always wanted to be like my dad."

She doesn't sell what he sold, or live in his town, but she thinks like he did — and she follows her own advice, which would have been his, she knows.

"I tell my daughter: 'Whatever you end up doing, make sure you love it, because you'll be spending so much of your life doing it.'"