On The Feast of Stephen

Page and monarch forth they went,
    Forth they went together;
Through the rude winds wild lament,
    And the bitter weather.

On my perfect December day, something roasts in the oven, an old phonograph spins, candles cast amber light. It is a month for looking in and holding close. A month, as the old Advent carol implores, to trim the hearth and set the table.

But on Boxing Day, on this year the Monday after Christmas, the vineyard beckons. I rouse myself from a slumber fueled by buttery treats and amber ales. Every bone aches to not leave the warmth of home, to not venture south on the road to Canton.

The work this day is drudgery, mounding soil up around protective plastic sleeves I have placed around tender one-year vines. This warm and soggy autumn and winter have left the soil workable even at this late date. The rhythm of spade to soil, the clink of metal on field stone, the tenacious grasp of clover roots.

Plant by plant. Row by row. Slow, deliberate work. Eyes to the ground. Frost tinged clover leaves, clumps of soil. Dig. Churn. Thrust. Mound.

But shovel work is satisfying work. The sound of the spade cutting through turf. The pleasant earthy smell. Wriggling earthworms even still.  The soil is alive, and varied, as I cut across the sloping south vineyard: here clay and waterlogged, there sandy and flecked with smooth river pebbles.

It's the desperate honking of geese, however, that casts my eyes toward the sky. They settle into a perfect vanguard just as they pass overhead. I wonder if they are heading south in a hurry, perhaps realizing this balmy December has bid them stay too long.

Even after the noisy gaggle settles into a silent and perfect wedge across the sky, my eyes linger on the eastern horizon. It is startlingly cerulean, flecked with wisps of cirrus clouds. The words of the old advent carol echo cannily:

People look east, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year

In a month of pulling in and holding close, this is a day to look out. That's what the good king did on this day, which is also the Feast of Stephen. But while he gazed  upon snow, crisp and clear and even, I gaze upon a sloping vineyard planted in a field of clover, with a bright meridian sun casting long shadows.

I look out on gold tipped willow branches cast in sharp contrast to a bright blue sky.

I look out on yellow gables of the old farmhouse against a blue backdrop enlivened by fast floating puffs of white.

I look out on a crested blue heron taking wing from the marsh, rising from tawny grasses and red stemmed branches.

I look out on gently rippling lake waters.

I look out on the old tracks heading south to Canton, and know that once the four o'clock train rumbles by, this brilliant sky, and this startling day, will have passed.

I am thankful for this sky and this vineyard to tend, and these old songs that rattle around my noggin. December often casts a melancholy pall, and sometimes a leaden sky settles overhead around Veterans Day and lingers to well past Easter.

But this winter there have been days of bright sunshine, with the long shadows December casts even at noon.

And I think of Stephen, whose feast is this day, and who at the darkest hour, looked up, and saw the heavens open.

Annibale Carracci
The Martyrdom of St Stephen
1603-04 - Oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre, Paris

A Boxing Day of startling cerulean skies and gently rippling lake waters. A Feast of Stephen that brought me reluctantly out to tend these vines, and rewarded me with a magnificent sky.

All we have to do is remember to look up, and look out, and whether the sky be leaden and the ground sodden, or the horizon brilliant and the clover sweet underfoot, know that eventually the cruel frost and bitter weather of the good king's carol will find us.

But we will take these startling days, and these cerulean skies, and they will become the warm footsteps through the sod, the food and wine we will summon, the pine logs that will warm us, against that cruel weather, which will surely come.

In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.

That is what Boxing Day reminds us, to not just hunker down, but to look out, and up, with gratitude and charity, to make a feast of whatever it is that comes to us, however meager it may seem, knowing that sometimes a heron taking sudden flight from a marsh of brittle grasses may be enough bounty for one day.

Blue Christmas

The legendary Little Blue Santa, of Akron, Ohio

For as long as I can remember, come December my parents screw a blue bulb into the porch light of their small house on Seventh Street.

Other decorations came and went: Wreathes we made in the 70s from cellophane dry cleaner bags. A ribbon around the mailbox. Blinking lights strung along the eaves. Tinsel drapes on the front door junipers.

But the blue bulb is eternal.

I never gave it much thought until someone asked me why.

Folklorist that I am, I string a story together, as I am wont to do.

I recall my Dad's family's simple tree-top star, blue glass with a single bulb in the center, which topped our tree every year until it was more glue than glass.

This was my Grandma Hildegarde's star, whose pride and joy was her silver aluminum Christmas tree, trimmed entirely with blue glass orbs, illuminated by a rotating color wheel on the glass enclosed sunporch of her Ellet retirement home.

I recall my grandma Hildegarde as one who kept Christmas well. She decked the halls, no, well-nigh festooned them, with Victorian Christmas villages, paper honeycomb bells, tinsel, and beads. An intricate handcrafted ornament, her gift to each grandchild. Her elaborate German Christmas cookies, which had to be aged in a paper bag for three weeks with an apple and an orange to reach proper consistency.

I recall our old family nativity, its shepherd with the cracked face, and Mary with her sweet angelic face, clad in a robe of celestial blue, sheltered in a wood hewn manger built by a family member now departed.

I recall my hometown's legendary Blue Santa, a tiny ceramic figure excavated in downtown Akron from an old factory site near the canal, a wise and kindly old elf, clad in blue glazed robes in the German tradition, said to be America's oldest known figure of Saint Nick.

I recall tales of ribald English Christmases of yore, when roving bands of Yuletide revelers might at anytime storm your halls demanding figgy pudding, or worse, in not so polite a manner, and how it is said English Victoria's betrothal to German Albert brought to England the more gentle German fireside Christmas traditions: a tree in the parlor, carols by the fireside, visits from St. Nick, and Luther's gentle lullabies to the Christ child, replacing bawdy English street carols and wassail-fueled debauchery.

I think of my German cobbler great-grandfather, and his shop below the lodge hall on the North Hill of Akron, at Temple Square, and tales of how he kept the shoe store open no matter how deep the snow, and kept a warm fire blazing in the stove in the back room, and how it was said that people came to his shop not so much for shoes as for the hospitality and warmth of the fire.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Hosfield, with the Gregory grandchildren. James, my Dad, standing, Grover center, Mickey on his lap.

 I think of my own father's sudden boughts of yuletide merriment, our epic journeys up Smith Road Hill in a raging blizzard, to get something for my Mom's birthday, the longest night of the year. It wasn't just a shopping trip to Polsky's, it was an adventure, and how in the spirit of Hildegarde, but with his own twist, my Dad kept Christmas well.

I think of manning the Jaycees tree lot as a tiny kid with my Dad, downtown Cuyahoga Falls at Broad Boulevard and Front Street when it was a vacant lot, and how we burned scrap lumber in a wooden barrel, and strands of bare bulbs illuminated the offerings, and how we kids gathered branches up off the ground to take home and place in glass Pepsi bottles to make Charlie Brown trees for the dog.

I think of my Dad in his earflap hat and wool coat and corncob pipe, in his element chatting up the tree lot customers, most likely not charging anyone the full retail price, and as Christmas grew close and the night grew late, he gave away more than one tree to the mother with the old coat and the sad eyes, or the family with the rusty car and the dangling muffler.

So, of course in my mind it is a clear trajectory, from Bavaria and O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht to Akron's North Hill and Blue Santa, and my great grandfather's shoe store at Temple Square, and my grandmother Hildegarde's indominable Christmas spirit, and my Dad's own ways of keeping December festive. It all culminates with the blue bulb in the porch light on Seventh Street.

The 1978 Seventh Street Pageant. My sister, as Mary, of course is in blue. Tim holds Cuddles in her customary role, as a sheep.

 I weave my tale. I connect the dots. I ask my dad, finally, "Why the blue bulb?"

He considers it, for a moment, and says, simply, "Well, because a red bulb looks like a house of ill repute."

I ask my mom the same question. Of course, to her, it is all about the new fallen snow, and how of all the colors of light, it is the blue ones that sparkle on the snow that she has always liked best.

I try out my theory of the blue bulb on both of them, taking it back to Prince Albert and Luther, via Ellet and North Hill and Hildegarde's silver tree with the blue balls, and they both nod affirmatively. Oh, that's a good explanation, too.

So, no matter what the reason, for the better part of the four decades that this house has existed on Seventh Street, which was here as a dirt lane long before they put a number to it and this house sprouted in the side yard of an older one, there has been a blue bulb in the front porch light. It doesn't really matter why. But, if you'd like, I'll weave together a tale.

The View From Mount Pleasant: Thoughts On Veterans' Day

With two little babies at home in Lancaster, Ohio, my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, answered his country's call.

Marvin Lester Reid, December 16, 1945, in Japan.

He served in the Pacific. I know this not because he ever spoke of his service, but because my Mom had a little red kimono he sent home to his baby girl, and I once saw a portrait from a studio in Japan, in his dress uniform with a vase of orchids placed in the corner. I saw that photo when I was in college, in a shoebox of family photos. I had never seen my grandfather as a young man, and was startled: I felt like I was looking at myself. Same long face and big earlobes, same lanky frame. I was never a stout Gregory/Hosfield, always more of an attenuated Reid. I was home relaxing on a break from studying English literature, looking at a portrait of my Grandfather at exactly my age, on leave from defending his country.

He was a man of small town Midwestern civic virtue, in the best possible sense. He took obvious pride in his two story white wood frame house, with L-shaped front porch, set up on a steep embankment like all the houses on East Allen Street. He built a brick walkway the length of the long narrow backyard, lined with a long garden of roses, currants, and every vegetable you could grow in Southeastern Ohio. In a shady corner, a porch swing hung from an arbor he built under a crabapple tree. At the terminus of the walkway, paved with bricks salvaged when Lancaster paved its streets with asphalt, a white frame garage that looked more like a stable housed his immaculately waxed Ford LTD, traded in every four years at the local Ford dealer for an updated version of the same.

Jessie and Tim get a good seat on the stoop for the parade, January 4, 1971, Lancaster, Ohio, where my Mon's parents, Lester and Martha Reid lived.

 He did the family's shopping, and going "marketing" with him was an adventure. I loved riding in those plush velour Ford seats, as we went to the butcher, to farmstands, to places that had good butter and cheese. Even when Kroger put in a new, larger supermarket, he still shopped like he was at the local butcher or bakers, speaking to the deli man about cheeses, checking the produce carefully, scrutinizing cuts of meat and engaging the head butcher if something didn't look right.

He knew the proper seasons and places to gather morels, when the hazelnuts would be prime for gathering on Mt. Pleasant, where the best blackberry brambles were. Though his heart was too weak to scale Mt. Pleasant, he encouraged us to climb to the top, while he rested on a boulder. He wanted us to see that view: Lancaster's rows of neat frame houses, the beautiful fairgrounds, the rich fields that stretched all the way to the Hocking Hills.

Back at the house on Allen Street, I knew that at some point the first floor parlor had been converted to the master bedroom, the dining room was made into the living room, and the back porch enclosed as a bath. I knew Grandpa Reid had difficulty with stairs, that his heart had been weakened by rheumatoid fever picked up while serving in the Pacific. But I never thought of him as disabled: he worked all his life, tended his garden, took care of his home. I never heard him complain or express regret.


Holidays and special weekends were spent down in Lancaster. My Grandmother's table strained under the weight of robust turkey breasts and dozens of pies, of glistening glazed hams and cheesecake with homemade black cherry topping. Adults gathered around the kitchen table for Euchre and Camels, cousins sprawled on the living room floor with dogs and games of our own invention. When it was time to leave my grandmother and grandfather kept bringing more and more parcels of food to the car for us to take home. Thy wanted to make sure that way up in Akron we would still have good butter (and homemade rolls and drumsticks and pies and casserole.) My grandfather always told us to be careful (I think he mistrusted my Dad's Japanese cars) and lingered on the front porch until our car disappeared down Allen Street.

I have a brass antique car piggy bank, my Grandfather gave one each to Tim and I, from The Farmers & Citizens Bank of Lancaster. I am sure it is conglomerated into Chase or PNC or somesuch by now, but it always reminds me of him, his pride in his community, how he thought Ohio was the most beautiful place. I think we used to think he was a little provincial, old fashioned. But he had seen other continents, and oceans, and to him, the Grand Canyon could never compare to Old Man's Cave, Buckeye Lake was at least the equal of Captiva Island, Mt. Pleasant a more than splendid enough view.

It was an icy January when he died, salting those steep front steps on Allen Street. He didn't want the mailman to have a difficult time. He slipped and fell to the base. He died of head injuries. Of course, you could say that a septuagenarian WWII veteran with a weak heart had no business being out in an ice storm on those steep slippery steps. But that was not my grandfather: you salted your steps. You served your country. You looked out for your community. That is who he was, and what he did.

Every Veteran's Day and Memorial Day, I think of Lester Marvin Reid. I think of his soft spoken civic pride, his dutifulness, his love of country, of nature and things that grow, the way he provided for his family. I see those virtues in his daughter, and only hope that I can become a worthy grandson.

My Mom found the photo: my Grandfather, Marvin Lester Reid, on leave from the Pacific. My Mom, on the left, looks so much like my sister here. And I have my Grandfather's earlobes and forehead. Except for my Grandfather's uniform, I am certain my Grandmother, Martha Plank Reid, stitched everyone's clothes here.

·

They Tore A Schoolhouse Down Today

I’m always sad to see a classic three-story red brick schoolhouse torn down.

September 24, 2009. Philadelphia, PA.

I DO understand, it is being done in the name of our children's brighter future. The new school, I am sure, will be smart-wired and green and energy efficient and ADA compliant and all those good things.

William Brantly Hanna Pvblic School, 1908-2009.

But, still I can't help but think we lose something intangible.

Could not shake the feeling, she was not quite ready to go.

I taught in one of these sturdy old behemoths, General Wagner Middle School in East Oak Lane, Philadelphia. Shabbily maintained though she was, smelling of sour milk and old floor wax, she had good bones. Beneath grime and neglect, at least a little grandeur undergirds bureaucratic negligence. On certain clear sunny mornings after a holiday floor buffing, you almost felt hopeful ascending that marble staircase.

I am pretty sure the School Reform Commission is staffed by those same people as on the committee in 12 Monkeys.

An inherent public spiritedness pervades these durable old structures. From the carved limestone nameplates to the embellishments in stone and copper, a trace of civic pride remains from when this was a bustling city, a growing neighborhood, a new school, a hopeful place.

Before it was a boulevard, it was Broad Street, and there was a red brick schoolhouse there.

 Maybe my own past haunts me here. The low-slung brick and cinderblock elementary school I attended sat on the former playground of a three-story red brick schoolhouse it replaced. Broad Street School's cornerstone sat in the courtyard of our new school, a vestigial remnant of what was no longer there. Its presence was felt, but rarely referred to. One of my older teachers (she seemed elderly at the time but was probably only in her 50s) told the story of the students and teachers walking across the playground from the old school to the new on that bright spring morning in 1970. They carried their old books across the asphalt to the new.

The Broad Street name plate, in DeWitt's courtyard

That story stuck with me. I remember the jarring feeling as a student at the new Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary School, opening my battered old red Dick and Jane reader in Mrs. Suter's first grade reading class, to see "Broad Street School" stamped on the inside cover of that tattered old text. In a few months those battered old readers would be replaced by the new McGraw-Hill Reading series, orange and green and yellow and alive with 70s color, as the adventures of Dick and Jane and their ornery pet goat gave way to stories about Hector and We Lei.

Gordon M. DeWitt faculty, circa 1974

A shiny new school is a good and hopeful thing. All children deserve it. I just fear that something solid and durable and permanent is being replaced by something lesser and synthetic and faux stucco and somehow more shabby. I hope that is not the case. I hope for the students at whatever the school is that replaces Hanna, that it stands as a beacon in this rough but enduring neighborhood, that it stands among but above the rowhomes that it surrounds, that it offers a vision for the future that respects the place where these children come from, but also sheds a light toward someplace new and unforeseen.

A mighty task for a mere building to perform. I hope our school reform leaders understand that it takes more than a new building. Even our neglected aging red brick behemoths, on certain February mornings when the winter sun hits the buffed marble staircase jut right, were big enough places for the most audacious of dreams.

And I just couldn't shake the feeling that Hanna wasn't quite ready to go.

The Last Weekend In October, In My Hometown

The last weekend in October, in my old hometown, the silver maple leaves shrivel into brittle brown boats.

The last weekend in September, in my old hometown, a thick frost settles on pumpkins we place on our stoops, as pirates, witches, and goblins trick-or-treat, at our front doors.

The last weekend in October, a slender crescent moon hovers above our old home town, as mossy craggy canyon walls rise above our crooked river, and enumerated streets ascend through this old river town.

The widow Huff, over on 6th Street, lived in one of those tiny little houses, that are tucked among the already small houses of much of Ward 2, in my old hometown. One room wide, two rooms deep, a single bedroom perched on the second floor, under a steeply pitched roof. A pear tree in the front yard, a gravel driveway with a strip of grass down the middle, a big garden and a clothesline in back.

Summer days, she sat on her front porch, often in a bold-print orange polyester dress, with thick nylon stockings, and those heavy leather shoes old ladies used to wear, in the decades before nylon wind suits and New Balance sneakers.

Cooler months she'd sit in a rocker in her front room, keeping an eye on the block, receiving visitors: ladies from the Akron Baptist Temple who brought her a new calendar every year. A neighbor lady who checked in with and sat with the old timers. Kids from the block whose mothers sent them on little missions, to open jars, or get things off shelves, or take letters for her to the blue box on Meriline Avenue.

Once a week I stood on the sagging plank porch and rapped on the wooden screen door, which was purely a courtesy, since from her rocking chair perch a few feet away she already saw me coming. It occurs to me now, she had no TV.

"Collecting," I'd say, holding up my blue Akron Beacon Journal collection cards, bound together with stainless steel rings, holding my paper hole punch in the other hand: our very analog but surprisingly efficient system for keeping accounts straight.

Again, it was pure courtesy, since of course she knew who I was and why I was there, but as an overwhelmingly shy kid, I felt the need each week to make that little introduction.

She'd invite me in, I'd unlatch the screen door, and she'd have me retrieve her pocketbook from where it hung on a hook next to the small front closet, and her blue collection card, which we slid each week behind the Baptist calendar on the wall.

As far as I know, there was no lock on that front door, and every kid in the neighborhood knew where her pocketbook hung: that's where she'd have kids retrieve it when we sold baked goods for school, or took donations for band, or somebody needed paid for raking her tiny front yard.

One dollar and eighty cents was the cost of weekly home delivery, and she would count it out for me from her pocketbook, with crooked arthritic fingers, etched with the deepest wrinkles I had ever seen.

This small interaction was one of scores each Saturday morning. There was nothing remarkable about this house or this customer, but looking back, this routine, as well as the concept of a day's news printed out on wood pulp, and flung on your porch after school each day by a kid with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, seems impossibly quaint, so very last century.

Of course, there were a few people who would dodge you, pretend to not be home, or say they would gladly pay you next Tuesday when they already owed you for three weeks. But for the most part it was very simple: ring a door bell, rap on a screen door. Exchange pleasantries and dollars bills and niceties and quarters, punch a hole in their blue card and call it a week.

These little vignettes, these glimpses into the homes and the lives of my neighbors is one of the things, I think, that cements me to my old hometown. There were big houses on Chestnut Boulevard, these little widow cottages tucked on side streets, the ramshackle hovels,  and the places where the lawn was mowed at diagonal angles, with the furniture polished to a mirror-like sheen.

Over stairways and fireplaces I saw the same black construction paper silhouettes that Mrs. Burris traced of every kindergartner at DeWitt Elementary. In seven years of daily delivery and weekly collections, I saw customers progress through horrible illnesses, spouses tend to ailing loved ones, toddlers grow into school children, gangly teenagers get their licenses, graduate, fly the coop. Houses were sold or painted or added on to. More than one widow passed from this earth,

Widow cottages, some called them, and I remember the Red Haired Lady in the little white cottage, who argued with the Black Haired Lady, who lived next door, until one peeled off to the Beer Garden, and her neighbor, to the Boulevard.

The last weekend in October, in my old home town, just a few yellow leaves cling to the giant hackberry tree in front of the Methodist Church.

A week of frosty pumpkin patches, of falling leaves, of reveling in imagined macabre. This is the morning, however, when a bell tolls: for all the saints, who from their labors rest. 

You pull yourself together, you will yourself to heed the third direction of Mr. Wesley, "to sing lustily and with a good courage:" And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.  

Dean Wagner improvises on Sine Domine, the organ swells, the doors open. Just a few small leaves remain on the giant hackberry.

I think back to a Sunday in October, when the widow Huff, over on Sixth Street, who never seemed to rouse herself from her rocker, managed, somehow, to make for each of us, a popcorn ball, wrapped in cellophane, dyed fluorescent green. Because it was the seventies. Because, perhaps for her, it was cheaper, to make popcorn balls, rather than buy something from Sparkle Market.

Descending from that porch, a kid I did not know, showed to his Mom, from another neighborhood, the florescent homemade offering the widow granted each of us.


She shriveled her face into a ghastly mask, and declared, "That is going in the trash."


And I knew right at that moment that something in the old neighborhood had changed, that the widow Huff and her pear tree, and her kindness, and her orthopedic shoes, and the way she made for each child a treat from her own kitchen, were from another era, slipping rapidly, to dust. And that things in the old neighborhood, in Ward Two, with Patrick's Market and Lee's Store and Grant School and its cherry tree allee, would never be the same way, again.

You run til the river feels primordial

October in my hometown smells like bread baking and leaves burning. It sounds like train whistles and the last, desperate chirping of crickets.

You set out on a run, not really feeling it. You phone it in.

But, with each step, something:

Kids down on Front Street, painting Halloween scenes on storefront windows, with poster paints.

Burnouts smoking under the bridge.

The bells at St. Joe's clanging an unfamiliar hymn.

Tiny locust leaves raining down on gray sandstone.

Mule-eared whitetail deer staring you down from the center of the Gorge trail, then scattering up steep slopes, at the last possible moment.

The river bends. The sun sets, blazing the river banks gold and orange.

An October evening, and all is as it should be in my old home town.

This run did what is was supposed to do. It clears my mind. It focuses me on the place where I now reside: the place where the river bends. My old hometown. The great Falls of the Cuyahoga. Its sandstone cliffs. Its waterfalls. Its springs that gurgle from mossy quartz-flecked ledges.

Why is it that this quotidian place, which for forty years, I could take or leave, now seems so urgent?

Every day that I don't get out to these cliffs seems a tragic waste. Every day that I don't dip my toes in her oleaginous waters, I feel remiss.

Virginia Creeper

 So, you run. Past the old coal-burning power plant, that rained soot down over Seventh Street in your formative years. Past the old ice rink, built by the CCC. Past the big dam, which you hope you live long enough to see blown up.

Somewhere just past Mary Campbell's Cave, but before the arching grace of the High Level Bridge--that place where the desperate plunge and brandy bottles rain down--you reach it: you've run til the river feels primordial.

Crimson Dogwood

 You've run till the drone of Route 8 disappears, absorbed by beech trees, clinging to Sharon Conglomerate, with fierce determination.

You've run til the train whistles, and the smell of bread baking, no longer waft through sandstone canyons.

You've run til you arrive at that promontory sandstone boulder, that juts out over the river, in a grove of hemlock trees.

You've reached it: the place where the river bends. The place where atop the ledge Native Americans built their Big Cuyahoga town, above the great falls.

You watch the water dance, crisply, over river-smoothed sandstone rocks. It seems timeless, this river, and yet its changing route is etched in these very canyon walls. But this spot, this hemock grove, I imagine a denizen of Big Cuyahoga town might recognize yet today.

You marvel at the circuitous route you have taken, to reach this spot, a stone's throw from where you were born, in Sister Ignatia's hospital, up on the Gorge above the Little Cuyahoga's valley.

Golden leaves illumine my woodland path: sinewy silver trunked beech trees, sugar maples, and mitten-leafed sassafras all turned this week, lighting my way. Moss glows an impossibly vibrant green on puddingstone cavern walls after a wet, wet summer. Fungi of startling shapes sprout on the forbidden upper trail.

Golden sassafras leaves alight a woodland trail

These moss covered canyon walls. These lucky rock mountains. These beech trees, clinging for all they are worth, to craggy boulders, until they eventually succumb, and reveal a hollow core, that belies their tenacious grasping toward the sun.

I'm a body in constant motion. But, upon reaching this certain promontory rock, I sit. I listen. To the water. To the moon. To October. You reach a point: where this time, this place, this river, this moon, are everything. And enough. This wet magical summer, where one rainbow after another spanned the crooked river, where every day I forced myself out to the river, it yielded impossible riches.

The Road From Canton

The first scarlet leaves fall on our red brick roadway at the vineyard in Canton. Heading home, this first drizzly day of October, I crave cider and cinnamon rolls.

Shortening days and vacating sunlight also create an irrational, visceral need to acquire Indian corn, warty pumpkins, twisty gourds, and quite possibly, straw bales.

These needs will best be met by a back road, I decide. No harm, no foul Interstate 77 and your big box beckonings.

My road home today has many names. In Akron it is Canton Road, further north, Darrow Road or Route 91. But it starts down here as Main Street, in North Canton, which used to be New Berlin. In other places it is the Cleveland Road. Confused yet?

New Berlin Bubbles and Suds

North Canton presents a handsome face along its main street, Hoover's looming red brick plant, now idle, speaks of an earlier time, when small Ohio towns anchored multinational manufacturing concerns. The range of things made just in Canton...barrels, bearings, bricks...is impressive for a city of its size.

The road rolls north. Nurseries pile mums roadside to lure shoppers, trees and shrubs offered at fire sale prices. Hand stenciled signs every so often announce the Haunted Schoolhouse and Laboratory, now open on Triplett Boulevard for the season. Imperceptibly, North Canton ends, Main Street becomes Cleveland Road, and we are in the Western Reserve crossroads burgh of Greentown.

Old brick house on the Cleveland Road.

The Methodist Church heralds an upcoming Swiss Steak Supper, and catty corner a handsome old lodge building houses the Oddfellows and a barber shop. An American flag snaps taught under a leaded sky.

On the outskirts of Greentown, of course, is a custard stand, closed for the season. It may be called the Dari Delite, the Sundae Isle or the Creamette, but every middling Buckeye State burgh seems to have one, often with coney dogs.

More suburbs, more farms, more patches of lake. The road charges north, in aptly named Lake Township, toward the next crossroads, Uniontown. Bledsoe's butcher shop, to which we used to make semi annual pilgrimages from Summit County to stock our chest freezer, still stands in the wood frame storefront at the corner: deer processing, Trail bologna, sauerkraut balls. The red stripes on a barber pole, another American flag, a stop sign: vivid red under a fine Scottish mist.

An impressive water tower rises over a handsome cemetery, where Uniontown's turn of the century elite rest under picturesque, well-groomed hillocks. The dogwood leaves are now crimson.

At Beiler's, piles of pumpkins, strands of Indian corn, trays of fluffy rolls oozing with thick white icing lure me. Pecks of peaches, bushels of plums, canning jars and paraffin wax reassure me with their abundance, but portend a season's death.

Crossing the Tuscaraurus, we arrive in Summit County. Lake Tim Kam Park, one of those old time concrete-bottomed swimming lakes, is a ghost of simpler summer pleasure, diving boards stowed for the season, grassy beach empty of bathers.

Another township crossroads, and the old Springfield Township High School, with exuberant polychromatic art deco tile work, appears not much longer for this world. I imagine this rural school district in 1931, stolid school board members peering through wire framed glasses at architect renderings. I admire their moxie for fronting the county's main road with moderne exuberance in a dismal year. I can already tell, the state-funded replacement building, soon to rise here, will lack all such grace notes. Another red brick school house bites the dust.

On the trail of things that are lost, things that are vanishing, things that even now slip from my memory, like barely remembered childhood trips to Uniontown, to buy paper-wrapped steaks. This first day of a new month, when the season announces its change with insistent gray drizzle, a month that will end with us singing that mighty hymn, to All The Saints Who From Their Labors Rest.

So of course I find myself, guided as if by divining rods, to the old county sanitarium and TB asylum, now fenced off and weed-choked. I park at the Methodist church and walk, camera phone in hand, as a nice Methodist lady arrives to deposit her neatly bundled Methodist newspapers in the Methodist recycling bin. She mouths hello warmly and eyes me warily, simultaneously, as Methodists will.

Soggy sod sinks under now-saturated boots, the sky so dark and the atmosphere so thick, photos barely register. This ghost of a place. I can almost hear the rain seep into crumbling mortar, as the place sags perceptibly. Soon, the name Sanitarium Road will be all that is left.

Back on the Canton Road, through the community of Ellet. All is more familiar now, though I wonder where is Arnold's, where we stopped on the way to visit my grandmother Hildegarde, to buy peanut brittle. Ernest Angley's Grace Cathedral still rises here, testament to a time when Akron was a boom town, with so many transplanted Southerners that tent preachers like Angley and Humbard cast aside their tent poles to construct elaborate cathedrals.

Sometimes on a rainy Saturday, you take the back roads, in order to feel one township fold into the next. You stop at the crossroads. You buy sticky buns and pumpkins. You make note of things that have changed, seek out things that are vanishing, give thanks for what is still there to help you remember.

This road. Just a way home from work. Nothing special about it, but on every mile, something to remind me. Canton Road. Or Cleveland Road. It depends on your destination. I have acquired, somewhere along the way, an irrational trunk full of gourds and pumpkins and straw and pie. Time to go home, and construct a shrine to autumn. The vestigial remnant, perhaps, of an ancient seasonal ritual, to ward off gelid conditions, to give thanks for abundance, to mark another season’s passing.