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.

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.

Abundance

 Purple Prince. Mortgage Lifter. Brandywine. Cherokee Chief. All varieties of heirloom tomatoes, straining pendulously at the end of their vines. There are also supposed to be Yellow Pear, but they look suspiciously like Pineapple, golden on top, and crimson striped at the base. Sometimes, with heirlooms, you roll the dice.

If the old pear tree had not died, the gnarled dogwood that thrived in its shadow might have lasted longer. But with both remnants of the old farm that once stood on this place gone, it has opened up new opportunities. Suddenly, this corner is sunny.

A dove finds morsels in the dying dogwood tree.

My U-Haul still rests in the gravel driveway, but my shovels were packed last, so my first act in returning here is to turn the soil. Just as I remembered, there are pottery shards and bits of glass. An old neck to a glass bottle, emblazoned with the word CHLOROX is the day's best archaeological find.

Five spindly tomato plants, from Novelli's Florist a few blocks away, go into the soil. Also cucumbers and chard and peppers, and, almost as an afterthought, the contents of a packet of cactus flowered zinnia seeds. I drive a section of rusty iron fence, brought with me from Philadelphia, into my native soil to be their support.

Two months later, this humble garden, at best five feet square, is abundant with life. Hummingbirds and Monarchs wage aerial battles for the choicest zinnia nectar, while honeybees buzz contentedly below them, caked in pollen. A rabbit reclines languidly, hopper feet kicked back, chewing all the grass in a circle it can reach from this repose, until the fat long haired gray neighborhood cat approaches, and the rabbit, perturbed, hops half-heartedly into the hydrangeas.

This little patch. Placed as almost an afterthought. It never occurs to me not to: I just plant stuff, wherever I go.

And on this August night, the sunlight is golden. The crickets, impossibly loud. And I realize: everything is right here. We all have more than we need. Abundance. Life, overflowing. From a packet of zinnia seeds.

The Moon When Birds Cast Their Feathers

Nose to the ground, panting with excitement, the coon hound bounds from the front porch and down 16th Street, on a hot summer night just after July's full moon.

To the Cree and Ojibway, July is the Moon When Birds Cast Their Feathers. This July, at the vineyard where I spend my days, I am startled to observe a nest of blue eggs become squawking nestlings then mottled fledglings that are suddenly, tentatively airborne in the space of a few sultry July weeks. It is the month when life is at its most abundant.

Cottontail rabbits munch on clover, content at twilight, unperturbed by the hound's leashed enthusiasm. Bent at the knees and hunched on her sent trail, the hound soon forgets about the rabbits and is on to something up in the trees. Mammal population is at or near its peak, soon it will diminish as predators kill to feed their young.

Leaving the concrete sidewalks and clipped devil strips, we enter the woods and the craggy sandstone ledges of the Gorge of the Cuyahoga. The hound is unhinged: those ledges are alive with the scents of varmints and critters. A hundred yards away I catch the briefest glimpse of a red fox's distinctive trot. As we approach that spot, the hound bounds under the largest ledge and scrapes excitedly at the tiniest of crevices, perhaps the entry to a vulpine lair. We are but yards from the old mills and shuttered auto dealerships and sagging wood frame houses of Front Street, but this section of the river, teeming with critters, feels primeval.

Ascending from the river, up the steep streets past old corner stores where the proprietress scowled at you over the counter as you slid her a quarter for an ice cream treat on a hot summer's day.

We find ourselves on the route I used to walk daily to Harvey Bolich Jr High School, alto sax in hand, in a heavy black case. The sidewalks must have gotten smaller: how did a pack of three or four friends jostle down these same sidewalks sharing tales and treats from Open Pantry and King Quick and whatever Lawson's eventually became?

We find ourselves at the old school, a never lovely orange brick pile, for years fronting water-stained aqua window shades to the city's busiest street.

In July's warm late afternoon light, however, this night you almost forget about the olive drab lockers and endless gray halls and fickering florescent lights that did no one's Clearasil-soaked complection any favor. I notice, not for the first time, that squat orange pile of bricks crowns a rather lovely hill. Gazing toward State Road and the setting sun, round buildings are oddly prevalent: a water tower, a medical office, a brick apartment building, The Cathedral of Tomorrow, and of course, an infamous tower to nowhere.

This is the hill to watch storms blow in on sultry summer nights, and inevitably one does. The hound is startled, but not frightened by the large plunking drops. She runs a zig zag to avoid them, so it takes us perhaps longer than it should to seek shelter under the covered back entrance the Shop Wing.

Images from adolescence's cusp flood my mind. Mrs. Londa and her sewing machines. Shop class, making a sanding block, varnished with Deft. An industrial vacuum with ducts snaking the room, to collect the sawdust. The metal case where you put the safety glasses, to get sanitized by radiant beams. The foot pump on the industrial hand sink. Mr. Burns throws an eraser, to get the wayward trombone section's attention.

The storm quickly passes, as summer cloud bursts do. We trot along the ridge of the hill, where the hound discovers and rolls excitedly in a patch of clover. We seek shade under the only three trees in a vast expanse of grass, while below us the aluminum bats clink slow-pitched softballs, on all three fields. From Newberry Woods, a chorus of cicadas and crickets, and a million other things. Summer's full ripening, her endless fleeting song.

We make our way home, the hound panting and tracking and trotting, pure bliss. She is not ready to call it a night. One more circle around the block? She pleads with soulful hound eyes. Dog walks man.

The days get ever so slowly shorter now. Soon it is dark. The murmur of adult voices from front porches. The red tipped glow of a cigarette. Flickering TVs on living room walls.

These old streets. I could swear, again, the sidewalks used to be wider.

Something about those adult voices on distant front porches, the flicker of fireflies, the deafening chorus from a canopy of old oaks: I am taken back to other years, other nights, on these same streets above the craggy cliffs where the river bends.

I remember a hot summer night, on the cusp of high school, before we could drive, but were allowed to stay out just past dark. A night just like this. We walked, boldly down the middle of gravel and tar streets with big grassy gutters and steel driveway culverts: the sidewalks could no longer contain us. That same murmur from porches, distant cigarette glow, TV flicker.

Every day is a new beginning, even if you find yourself, at forty, on the old streets of your old home town.

The unbridled excitement of a coon hound on a night in the month when life is at its most abundant. There are too many scents, too many trails to follow. Every summer someone is on the cusp of fourteen. There are too many choices. Every summer the chorus in the canopy swells until you think, how can it possibly be this loud? How can this possibly end? The haunting, continuous--though fleeting--night song of the Moon When Birds Cast Their Feathers.