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.