A Book Bound In Oak

Close followers of this page (there are seven of you, I am counting!) will understand, there are myriad reasons for returning to my hometown.

But, this afternoon, after a walk through our old cemetery looking at Civil War Soldier graves, I finally understood.

I love this town because inside of the cemetery, in the chapel, there is a book. It has a white oak cover, inscribed with images of acorns and oak leaves. Every year, its vellum pages are etched with the names of the veterans who fell that year. In calligraphy.

That book sits on a special stand, inscribed with the same leaves and acorns as the book's cover.

This afternoon, my childhood mailman's cousin turned each page, slowly. We were looking for the names of a lady's brothers, who fell in the great war. On every page, one of the three of us knew the family who lost someone.

Finally, we found the page, where the lady's brothers were buried. She will be buried on the same hill.

I love this town.

I love it because it is the place where the Cuyahoga makes its steepest bend.

I love it because we have a special oak bound book, in Oakwood Cemetery, where we list the names of the Saints who from their labors rest.

Erected by the Ladies Cemetery Association, 1890

I know, just north of us, on Route 8, there is a town with a fey historic district, where the people put on airs.  It is lovely place. But I bet they don't have an oak bound book like we do here. Money can buy you a vulgar house in an insipid subdivision, but it cannot buy you a book. Bound in oak. Where each year, we inscribe patriot names.

The lady and I poured over every page. Newberries and Sills. Mothersbaughs, Plums, and Wetmores. Once she found the page where her brothers were listed, and the hill where she, too, will be buried, she was at peace.

Me, too. Bury me at Oakwood Cemetery.

Put up a sandstone monument. Let it fade into nothingness with the centuries.

This place. This town. These trees. This river.

I love Goose Egg Island. Which, technically, I should not be speaking of. It is off limits. Federally protected. But put me in a canoe and I will find my way there.

The place where the river bends.

It is every town, yet singular. America's weirdest, and best, hometown.

Vineyard Days

In September, the sun rises in a dewy vineyard.

  

Its rays light the morning fog to a warm amber, before burning it away to one of those startling September days of intense color, abundance, and cider-sweet air. The orchard smells winy as apples drop and ferment, the grapes are about to pop from their skins. 

 Ending my work day, the sun sets against a violet horizon. I arrive home in my old hometown, and for the second night in a row rainbows span the Cuyahoga. I go to bed by the light of a full harvest moon. September, the golden month.

I work in a vineyard. That's poetic. Or biblical. Or something. This I know to be true: with each passing year, I relish the seasons more. 

Days in the vineyard are days well spent. We capture the sun's rays. The grape's insatiable leaves unfurl palpably on warn and sunny days, and noticeably dwindle when the sun, as it does, chooses not to shine on Connecticut's old Western Reserve.

On more days than you would think possible, however, this old corner of Plain Township feels like Tuscany. Or, the way a guy who's only foreign travel is to lands drizzlier than his own...Ireland...England...bonny, misty Scotland...imagines Tuscany to feel.

The equinox approaches, the days grow shorter, but here in the vineyard the grape tendrils grasp and pull higher. New clusters emerge, with no hope of ripening before a deadening frost.

 Life abundant. Overflowing.

Of course, a certain tinge is in the air. By evening, it's sweater weather. And Virginia creeper, ascending a shagging barked silver maple, is on the cusp of turning full out crimson.

Veraison arrived in June, that fleeting time when the grapes turn from green to purple. The birds dive in frightening, voracious hordes, stripping at least an acre bare before we secure the netting.

Six weeks hence, clusters linger on the vines, sweetening by the day. Wasps and yellow jackets swarm. Most likely, on the equinox, we will harvest.

A cold late start to the summer means we let them linger on the vine a bit longer. More will be lost to birds and wasps, and possibly, thanks to abundant rain, mildew. But, it was once said, grapes, when they suffer, produce finer wine. Our young vines, on this new vineyard, on an old tree farm in the old industrial burg of Canton, Ohio, produce their first fruit this fall.

We’ll pick on the day that summer finally ends.

Another season. Don’t let it be said that we did not outstretch ourselves toward the sun, and find succor in these golden vineyard days. The clouds roll, impossibly pillowy over fervid blue skies. Here, In Northeastern Ohio, the flowers outdid themselves in vigor, thinking, just for a moment, this was a sun-drenched vineyard, somewhere in Tuscany. 

 

9/11/11: This Town. These Trees. This Sky.

Morning jogs usually take me through the cemetery of my hometown. Towering oaks. Ancient yews. A curving lane ascends a rolling hill. Obelisks. Shrouded urns. Angels with eroding faces.

Monuments eroded and mossy.

This dew kissed autumn morn the old sandstone markers are mossy. You smell soil in the air: moist, aromatic, organic. A few leaves, the season's first, flutter to the ground. This place, at once hallowed and ordinary, like any other wooded plot, is alive with the teeming activity of a million dying things.

Teeming with the life of a million dying things.

All around me, names familiar. Newberries and Sills. Wetmores and Taylors. Father. Mother. Baby.

On Poet's Hill. a twin trunked beech shelters Sills and Newberries.

Our town's small and quiet memorial, for those who fell in the line of duty, is a bell that never tolls. It is in this cemetery, in a mossy sandstone alcove, resting on a foundation of stones likely quarried from our crooked river's steep and dangerous gorge. In a grove of ancient oak trees, for which this cemetery is aptly named, all is silent on this morn, but for autumnal crow chatter, crickets, distant train whistles: the sounds of my hometown in September. A bell forever silent, for those who watch, who sacrifice, who serve.

A bell that never tolls.

I think of the last of the Great War's Doughboys, who I had the honor of watching in surely one of their their last parades, down our city's broadest boulevard, to this oak shrouded cemetery. Their American Legion caps perhaps a bit rumpled, their silent discernible pride. We stood when they passed, I offered by best imitation of a Cub Scout's salute.

That's the thing about your hometown, if you know it well enough, you get to a point where there is a ghost behind every tree. A morning jog on a route first chosen, perhaps, because it provided a little welcome afternoon shade, becomes a journey through memory's hallowed ground. The name on a headstone, an elderly neighbor. He flew his flag, as did his neighbors, from the little cape cod houses that sprouted up in the farmland, the embodiment of the Greatest Generation's postwar dream.

A concert T-shirt, from my favorite band, chosen this day for no particular reason, prompts my octogenarian neighbor to recount jumping out of an airplane to cross a German river: for him, "Over the Rhine" has literal implications.

This is my hometown, with its quirks, its flaws, its characters. Not a perfect place, but my place, and I think of it like our quiet shady memorial, built on a foundation of solid stuff.

Roots anchor beech trees to sandstone boulders

Groves of old craggy oak trees, covered in lichen.

Sandstone boulders perched precariously in hemlock groves above a crooked river's gorge.

Honorable, humble men forging homes in little new postwar houses, with hopes that their children will know a world of peace. Flags flutter humbly on block after block Memorial Day and Flag Day and Veteran's Day, on numbered streets marked with concrete street posts painted yellow and black every summer.

These few quiet moments on this September morning, in this venerable oak grove, in front of these mossy stones and this tarnished bell, I think, just for a moment, this is enough, these quiet moments to pause, to reflect. Take the morning off.

But I am not one to ignore exhortations, and there were his words, this week in the church newsletter, my retired pastor, he who stood so resolutely so many years on those wide steps, now in great pain, unable to attend the church he so loves, imploring, "THIS Sunday remember to lift your heads and hearts when you enter First Church. The Church is of God and will be to the end of time. You are ALL loved by God, so accept his love when you go to church this Sunday. One place you may find God if you are looking for him is in church."

So this Sunday morning, on the old Church square set aside by our town founders, we all go seeking, under that tall spire, into a bright sunny sanctuary. We cross a lawn dappled with leaves newly fallen from a giant hackberry tree.

The season's first hackberry leaves mottle the still green lawn.

A bronze plaque on the gnarled hackberry trunk indicates, in 1971, the year of my birth, it was the tallest tree of its kind. Forty years later, it just may soon overtake that spire.

Forty years ago, the tallest tree of its kind.

And so the rhythms, familiar, but some things different, enfold me this morning.

A Charles Wesley hymn (the best ones, always) opens the service, and I remember that in the old hymnals, O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing was always honored as the first one in the book, immediately following John Wesley’s timeless (1761) Directions for Singing. Third graders eagerly receive their Bibles, a gift from the Church, and I think of my simple black Bible with small gold letters, HOLY BIBLE, bearing the signature inside the front cover, of our pastor, Dr. Drake.

We sing to Sibelius's most haunting melody, Finlandia, and I know right then that the simple images set to it by a hymn writer long ago will fuel my afternoon run through my hometown's sandstone ledges later this day: My country's skies, bluer than the ocean. Sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine. Here, are my hopes, my dreams, my heart. But other hearts, other lands, have skies just as blue as mine. Never underestimate the power of your church to recharge your internal ipod with just the right song for this day.

At some point in the service, my mind wanders as it will. I open the battered pew hymnal in front of me, the dark blue new revised edition, presented to the congregation in 1989, by members to honor all the saints who from their labors rest. I find that the hymn book in front of me is the one dedicated to my confirmation classmate, by his parents.  He died on a terrible night many Februaries ago, in a car that careened through a barrier and over a ravine of our beloved Cuyahoga's stunning but always dangerous valley.

On this September morning, newly returned to my hometown after several decades away, in this sunny yellow sanctuary, I remember to look up, as Dr. Waller implored, and I recall the words of Rev. Schleup to a small group of us, huddled after that devastating funeral, decades ago: "Some of you may not want to enter this room again for awhile, after the sorrow of this day. Do not be afraid. This room is big enough to contain all of the sorrow, and all of the joy."

We step out of the Sanctuary into a blue sky with billowing clouds, the kind I have seen so often since I returned to Ohio, the kind I don't remember seeing nearly so frequently in other parts of the world. I am so glad to have the Sibelius tune in my head this day of all days, as I contemplate blue skies, sunlight beams through the yellowing foliage and down the gnarled trunk of the old hackberry: This, my song, O God of all the nations.

Sun dappled canopy.

We walk a few blocks down to the riverfront. A small community chorus sings, a color guard presents the flags. The  Mayor speaks.

Just before 1:00, our national moment of silence, that blue sky suddenly turns menacing. Thunder claps. Rain pelts. A September sky, impossibly blue just moments ago. Everything changes in the blink of an eye.

The rain and the menacing skies stay with us most of this afternoon, so I set aside other duties to write these words, in my hometown, above the place where our crooked river makes its sharpest turn. I am ever thankful for that craggy sandstone foundation, covered with lichen and moss, that is this old river town's gift to me.

Each day my hometown presents itself to me anew.  It is the gift of those who came before me, who set aside a church square where steeples would rise, and planted trees that would shade our veteran's memorial stones, and staked their dreams to these hills.

Under an ancient yew, the grave of a founder.

They and those who came after taught me these songs, and encouraged me to sing them "lustily and with a good courage," as Dr. Wesley implored. They gave me a gift and a strength that would always be mine, these stones, these hills, these words, these songs, summoned as if by an internal carillon, tolling at the bleak noon of our darkest days: 

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.


You wander the oldest graveyard in your old home own. You listen for the echoes of the exhortations of your elders. You remember that someone planted and tended these trees. Someone placed these stones. You gaze up, at the cerulean sky, the roiling clouds, with a humble and a grateful heart.

This sky.