"Childhood"

My friend and I were somewhere in the flatlands of farm country when I told her childhood is the word for the week.  "You've written often enough about childhood; you can write anything you want!"  Which seems like great advice since that's what I wanted to hear.  Be forewarned, this is a photo heavy post.

We stopped in Mount Gilead, Ohio and ate in a Masonic Temple.  I gotta say, the creme brulee French toast was awesome and Korki loved her breakfast scramble.  The diner was filled with locals and I watched as a waitress helped an elderly woman with a bunged up shoulder out of her coat and settled her comfortably in her seat.  Korki and I agreed "You don't see that very often anymore" as we smiled at the vintage manners and decor.

Korki demonstrating good natured tolerance
while getting sleeted upon

Korki was humoring me by accompanying me on my visit to the dead ancestors.  My facebook cousin Michael Miller posted pics of our ancestors' graves in Morrow County, and I thought it would be a great day trip.  Let me be start by being fair and saying Michael gave me clear enough instructions.  It's not his fault Korki and I drove a couple miles one way, then several miles another, to backtrack and reattempt the first failed direction before going back to the last correct thing we'd done with Michael's instructions where we immediately found Rt. 156 next to the river just like he'd said we would.

Barn we saw when we were on the wrong road

It was a sludgy day with a flat, gray #5 sky.  The entrance to the graveyard is a long, narrow drive of mud and brambles.  We parked the car because we worried about getting stuck and slogged our way through the muck while getting gently sleeted on.  Then the hill of stones appeared in the woods.  Duntadaduuuuh!

I'm pretty sure I'm related to just about everyone on that hill in one way or another.  A lot of the stones are down or broken, but my direct ancestors' stones were up and waiting for me.  Someone put stars and flags on the vets' graves which pleased me.  Some of you know I'm a life-long pacifist who really wants wars to stop -- and yet I can't help but be pleased that my ancestors repeatedly fought for freedom.  From the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, my people were willing to bleed for the country's right to exist.

Korki is a very good sport and let me tromp around taking pictures and reading illegible stones despite the inclement weather.  She was an extra really good sport when I was unsuccessfully rocking my car in the mud.  She got out and gave a push and we managed to get out of the muck.

Christenia's stone is broken.  It should match Jacob's.

We stopped at Grandpa'sCheese Barn on the way back home.  I was the one who wanted to go there, but oh my was it busy!  Between cheese, trail bologna, lime pickles, chocolate turtles, and fudge, well, I'm poorer than when we went into the place and that doesn't even give me credit for all the stuff I decided not to buy.

It was a good day despite the muck and weather.  The best part of it for me was getting time to just yackety yack in the car.  Some of that actually included discussing the ancestors, and maybe here's where I'll tie this all in with "childhood".  Korki pointed out that I may be interested in genealogy because I spent a lot of time on Grandma's porch while she talked about the people long gone.  I sat on her lap while she rocked, and I loved listening to the cadence of her voice as she talked about the people who made me.  It's a gift of childhood that I hope many people give to the children in their lives.

No idea if this is a good idea or not, but I like limes and I like pickles?

For those of you who might be interested in how the graves are in my family tree...

"Hybrid"

I looked through pages and pages of stock photos online for a work project, and felt my usual irritation that creative people aren’t paid nearly enough for their work, and my further irritation that I can never seem to find exactly what I want in those stock photos. 

Of course some of my irritation could be from too much work and not enough play.  I decided to go home early, but my car took a left instead of a right out of the parking lot.  I drove into the big city to Lakeview Cemetery.

Lakeview was created in a time of huge wealth in Cleveland, when cemeteries were parks for the unwashed masses to stroll around in and admire.  Us regular folk still like to stroll around there.  It really is like a park, with lots of trees and serenity and sculptures.  We wander around the winding drives and try to find weeping angels and tour the tomb of President James A. Garfield.

I suspect nobody outside of the area even knows who President Garfield was, but he was a local boy, so he got a grand tomb.  He became president in 1881, and was assassinated in the same year.  I don’t think he really did much in his 4 months of office, or during his 2 months of lingering death after getting shot, but he’s got a beautiful building for his remains with an excellent view of Lake Erie.

 

Garfield’s tomb and Wade Chapel are both on the national register of historic places.  The chapel is a small building, but it’s stunning.  There are windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany, and there are spectacular mosaics on the walls of Old Testament prophets by Fredrick Wilson of Tiffany Studios.  Seeing Tiffany masterpieces is like seeing Van Gogh paintings in person.  When you study that kind of thing in books or slides in a lecture, it’s hard to see what the fuss is all about.  When you see Tiffany masterpieces in the light they were designed to be in – well, it can take your breath away.  Gorgeous.

My original idea in going to Lakeview was what’s more “hybrid” than an angel?  And I knew just where to find them.  How lucky am I to have such a spectacular cemetery to spend some time shooting better angles of angels for that work project too.  Okay, so I didn’t limit myself to angels and took pictures of a lot of sculptures, angels or not.

  

I used the work camera which is, em, limited, so my apologies to my photography friends for the lack of technical brilliance with these photos.  I’ll fiddle them in PhotoShop for that work project.  The angel doodle is part of the fine layout I did.  Sometimes I like these little drawings better than the finished product.

And for those of you who use Blogger, what's up with it this weekend?!  This was ssoooooo hard to post today!

"Haunt 2"

When I was just old enough to start bicycling my way out of my river valley, one of my first accomplishments was visiting the graveyard next to the Grange Hall.  A Grange Hall is a place where farmers get together and talk about stuff, probably price fixing or manure sharing or something.  I’m not really sure what the farmers talked about because even though the Grange is still used and maintained, there aren’t that many farmers around these days. 

It used to be on the other side of the street, but there isn’t an other side of the street any more.  It’s just air next to the giant cliff that shadows my valley.  It’s a spectacular spot which gives a view of trees and river that stretches for miles.  See that blue down there amongst the trees?  That’s where I grew up.  The street was moved over since the cliff kept collapsing, and in the bare beginnings of my memory, the cliff was reinforced with a steel retaining wall.  I don’t know if they had to move the cemetery or not, but it is currently right next to the Grange Hall, almost invisible in a pretty grove of trees.  You can barely see it in the top photo, to the left of the building, just past that big yellow, orange maple tree. 

There aren’t that many headstones, and whoever decided where to put the graves lacked organization, with graves scattered around in various clumps.  The graves are old.  Okay, maybe not European or Egyptian old, but old for Ohio, with dates from the early 1800’s.  The Indians in the area didn’t put up headstones, though a school friend told me they had an old Indian buried on his property.  I always meant to go and visit the Indian, but never did.  It’s too late now since that area is covered with McMansions.  I bet that old Indian isn’t too happy about it.

Ella’s grave was the one that really captured my young attention.  She got one face of a 4-sided obelisk, one of the later graves, and easily the largest hidden in the trees.  She was only 17 when she died, and was married to a very old man.  Or at least that’s the way I’ve always remembered it.  I went to the cemetery last week to take pictures of the fall leaves and pay my respects to Ella, but I couldn’t read her stone any more since the weather has been wearing down her memory over the decades since I first rode my bike to visit her.  I went back today, despite my lingering cold, and despite the overflow of hurricane Sandy impossibly smacking Ohio.  It was cold, wet, and windy, but I did a rubbing of Ella’s grave so she won’t be forgotten yet.

Anybody can do rubbings of headstones.  Just put a thinnish piece of paper over the inscription and rub a crayon, charcoal, or something over the paper.  The inscription appears like magic.  I used one of the oil pastels I got from cleaning Polly’s house last week.  It seemed appropriate to use a recently passed woman’s pastel to remember another woman, or at least that’s the way I was thinking at the time -- counting me, it was a 3-woman job.  I tried doing a rubbing of an older grave, but some stones are too far gone to be recaptured.

When I was young, I was outraged Ella was married off to the old guy and she was listed like his possession.  What good is it to marry an old guy just because he has enough money for a fancy headstone?  What was her maiden name?  Is her family planted around her in the same tiny rock garden?  I felt bad she died so young.  Going back to visit her, I don’t feel so bad or mad about any of it any more.  This is a peaceful grave yard.  R.I.P. Ella.

After a little research...

I thought Elizabeth made an excellent suggestion to do some research on Ella, and I found out that Ella died of "consumption".  According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, that means "a progressive wasting away of the body especially from pulmonary tuberculosis".  Poor Ella.

On a brighter note, check out Elizabeth's blog here.