"Folklore"

I spent quite a bit of my youth looking for melonheads.  Well, I never actually looked for them.  This NE Ohio folklore has had teenagers drinking and/or kissing in the dark of a specific wild and wooded area for over 100 years.

I was a kid when I first heard about melonheads.  Tough, older boys told a frightening tale of how they'd driven to a mansion in the daytime and hairy humanoids attacked their car, jumping on the hood and baring ferocious teeth.  Neighbors gathered to listen and examine deep scratches on the car.  I resolved to stay away from melonheads until my teenaged heart fluttered at a cute boy's invite to seek the monsters out.  Thankfully, he was more interested in drinking and kissing than actual cryptozoology. 

There are different stories, but the version I learned is a Dr. Crowe kept hydrocephalous (water on the brain) children.  He experimented and tortured them until they revolted and killed the bad doctor.  The poor children with melon-sized heads fled to the woods and lived there ever since.  Of course sick kids with big heads couldn't actually do those things, but keep logic out of this.  The fact is people report seeing melonheads which keeps the story alive.  I'm uncertain if I've seen them for that matter...

1. A noise woke me up when I was a very small child.  I peeked around a wall and saw a hairy monkey-like animal on the kitchen counter.  It snarled at me with a lot of sharp teeth.  I backed away and went to bed, hoping it wouldn't rip me and my family to shreds in the night.  Our house was under construction at the time, with plastic across the back to keep out the weather, but apparently not the wildlife.  Obviously, the art above should be all the evidence you need to convince you of its existence.  Okay, it's pointy ears weren't green, but other than that.

2. I was driving 35+ mph in the melonhead zone with girlfriend #1, at twilight.  A field was to our right, and something that looked almost human was running in that field.  It was going in the same direction as we were and it kept pace with us.  The light was very poor.  I can't say what I saw, but my girlfriend saw it too.  It scared both of us to death.

3. Girlfriend #2 and I drove from a party in Ashtabula (another rural place of weirdness).  I'll admit, we'd been drinking, but neither of us was impaired.  Our headlights lit up 2 humanish figures in a deep ditch at the side of the road.  It was 3-4:00 a.m. and there wasn't a house for a mile or two in either direction.  My friend absolutely, adamantly refused to go back.  I said, "What if there was an accident and they need help?"  My friend sanely pointed out we would've seen a car.  I don't want to sound crazy, but I'm real uncomfortable remembering those faces.  I'd like to think they were heavily bearded guys in a ditch where nobody in their right mind would be in the middle of the night.  I don't know what melonheads would be doing in the ditch for that matter.

Sunglasses next to print to give you sense of scale
but the black shadow they cast is kind of misleading

4. Girlfriend #3 and I found these 8 1/2" long tracks when we were walking in the woods.  We looked for the track-maker, but we couldn't find it.  It later occurred to me we should've looked up in the trees instead of at the ground.  I took my friend home, learned how to make a plaster cast, then stood nervously in the woods alone as the plaster dried.  None of the naturalists at the parks' headquarters could identify the tracks, even after poring through their reference books.

For more on melonheads go to Wikipedia or Weird Ohio (the last testimonial is very like my #2 above).  There are lots of websites on the topic which makes me wonder.  Life is strange.  Was the folklore of Dr. Crowe torturing sick children the best way for folks to make sense of animals that might actually exist, but aren't supposed to be real?  Or was it all to make girls clutch their boyfriends in the dark?

"Midsummer Night"

Happy birthday to all of my Cancers! I have to admit that I’ve never been able to find your constellation in the night sky, but after finding the Big Dipper, all the other stars look like a jumbled mess to me. My mind wanders when I’m looking at the dark and I often end up watching lightning bugs instead.

I used to live at a place that was buried in 120 acres of woods. There was a pool in a clearing, and I floated around on my back looking at the sky. The crickets sang, the breeze rustled the grass and leaves, and the frogs chirped and bellowed in the distance. Bliss. That’s the kind of noisy quiet I love best, and there are so many more stars when we get away from city lights.

I think of all those childhood camping trips where the adults talked in low voices around the campfire while I was supposed to be sleeping inside the tent. The closeness and distance was a lullaby of things that had nothing to do with me while the parents sang, and drank beer and told each other stories. I could smell the dew dropping and the dampness of the tent and hear my siblings’ soft breathing while I snuggled inside my warm sleeping bag which was strategically placed over the sharpest rock in the forest.

I can also think of wild nights of underage drinking, dancing in city water fountains, parties in the alley, intimate moments, and stomping home in high heels after a particularly bad date. Not everything that happens at night is a good thing.

The world is different at night. There are different animals, different sounds, different smells, and everything seems closer and farther away at the same time. It’s a time for reflection and thinking and hoping. Our nighttime thoughts and dreams are what make our daytime realities come true.

I’m losing myself in a cloud of memories while trying to write something worth reading. My memories of good things bump against my tragic memories of people dying in the dark. Do people ever die in the daytime? Or do people just let go when the night brings the other side so close to our consciousness? If I get my pick, I’d like to die in my sleep in a gentle drifting from one world to the next.

I made this crab art this week when I was thinking bright, happy thoughts for my Cancer people, but “Midsummer Night” has sent me down an unexpected path of memories. Maybe I should let my mind wander to nights spent with Cancers Jennifer and Harry looking for melon heads? Or discussing fission with Phil? Or drinking wine coolers with Phyllis? Or debating politics with Jerry? Or, or, or… there are a lot of Cancer moments to choose from because I seem to have an unerring ability to find them. Slow learner or destiny? I’m feeling a desire to go looking for melon heads tonight :)