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.