Sunday, August 22, 2010

(sigh)  The days go by.  My father is getting better, even walking much of the time now.  He still is not able to drive, and my mother needs daily care.  My uncle has been in the hospital for over a week and will be released to assisted living, quite possibly permanently.  We have been dealing with my aunt, whose early stage Alzheimer’s has been aggravated by the stress of my uncle’s illness.

 And all of the reasons I left so many years ago are flooding back at me.  There are too many to reveal here, but as I relive the same scenarios and conversations of my teens, I’m trying to count to ten, walk away or tune out this time.   At least I’ve found that I’ve become more patient and wiser(?) with age, finally realizing that nothing I say will change the decades-old attitudes and patterns now.
 

It is day by day, and most of my time is spent in this isolated little world.  I try to spend positive time by myself every couple of days.  Yesterday I drove to Wheeling, hoping that the Greek church festival would be more exciting than it was.  I took a couple of photos of colorful belly dancing wear, then went to the Central Market on the next block.   Poked my head into a couple of shops (including a little wine shop kind of reminiscent of Spirited) and shot a few little details along the streets.   

It had to happen.   You know how I love to photograph vegetables.  I found a farmers market. 

Interestingly enough, in this predominately rural area, the farmers market concept is just getting started.  Apparently, many people garden rather than farm.   They are used to selling from roadside stands next to their driveways, but an organized, weekly venue is still in the testing stage here.  Go figure
 

The one I’ve latched onto for the past two Saturdays is in my parents’ hometown of Bellaire.  The vendors may or may not sell their wares to local stores, as my grandfather did.  Today, by the way, would have been his birthday. Yesterday was the market's  “Green Event,” and it looked like attendance was better than last week.  

Many of the vendors have gone organic;  some are retirees who love to grow.   Others do this as a side business.  There may be one, a rancher, who raises natural beef, pork, lamb and chickens as a livelihood. 

There are several who are bakers with natural breads (from organic wheat,) cupcakes and treats like brownies and sweet loaves of banana/strawberry bread and zucchini bread.  There are a couple vendors who make all natural soaps and lotions.   Yesterday there was a butterfly tent with lots of information on keeping that population strong in the wake of overdevelopment and pesticides.

This market, because it’s in its beginning stages, is very fluid.  Vendors may come one week and not the next.  Or take a couple of weeks off.  Or try one week and not return.  This is very strange to me, especially coming from Rochester, where the Public Market, in existence for at least 60 years, does business three days a week, and Cannon Beach’s Tuesday market has been a huge success from day one.

I had a long conversation with one gentleman, a retired engineer, who brings his produce here to encourage people to eat healthier, fresh food.  He recently visited Germany, and the culture impressed him—all fresh foods, people out and about looking fit and healthy.  He’s right.  As rural and sprawling as this area can be, it is the land of Bob Evans Restaurants and Ponderosa Steak House.  There are, I’m sorry to say, two Walmarts within 20 miles.  Much of the population is getting older (i.e. my parents.)  The majority of the rest has become lazy. 

Yesterday I met Chef Gene Evans, now a culinary instructor at West Virginia Northern.  He brought three students with him, picked out a few things from the market vendors and cooked up samples right there for people to try---for free.  He and I talked about the area being so far behind in the local/green food movement, and he is trying to get his students to think local and is interested in working with community gardens.  I'm sure he would like to hear about the North Coast's Slow Food group.

Some of the vendors at the Bellaire market dedicated to providing local, natural goods include:  Sparta Farm, Green Ridge Farm, Fine as Frog’s Hair, Butterflies from Heather, Intentions Jewelry, CrossRoads  Farm, Mr. Greenjeans, The Cookie Jar and Sue’s Sweet Treats.

Sundays are quiet here.  Tractors are quiet;  traffic is coming from church;  grandchildren visit across the road.  I was the only one out doing yard work.  It’s a day of rest for most.  Besides, the thermometer read near 90 degrees today, but it wasn’t as humid.  We still haven’t had rain, which is bad.    
 

This was not a good day.  My father was in a foul mood, dissatisfied with everything and being contrary.  I know he’s frustrated by his situation and has never been overly patient.  All I can do is step back or tread carefully when I feel a clash coming on.  Déjà vu.      

(sigh) Patience, patience, patience, count to 10.  There’s a lot going on.  I’m here to help.  More appointments this week.

And now it’s August.

I was hoping to go to the Italian Festival, but the temperature was in the 90’s, and the dew point was around 70.  I decided I didn’t want to travel 30 miles to Wheeling, look for a parking place amidst construction and a high profile funeral procession then die alone of heat stroke. 

 
So I decided to check out some local roads off of Route 40, Historic National Road.  Rt. 40 runs through the heart of this area, beginning in Cumberland, Maryland and ending in Illinois.  Today’s little assignment started when I saw a sign for Warnock.  “What would Warnock look like?,” I wondered.  Oddly enough, when I got to the end of the road, I’d BEEN THERE BEFORE!  Hah—just by way of a different road.   It’s the home of Bob’s Transmission and a church where someone always seems to be mowing the lawn.   I remember someone mowing the lawn when I was there last year, as were two people today.

Then I checked out the Lloydsville Road that really just looped off of and paralleled Rt. 40.  Another coincidence:  as I pulled up to photograph the church (pretty much the only landmark in Lloydsville,) and I read the sign in front, the ‘70’s song “Are You Ready?” began playing on the radio.  I’m just sayin’…

 
Farther west, I took a left onto Town Hall Road.  Did not see a town hall anywhere, but I was pretty glad that I have an SUV to gear down on steep gravel roads like this.  

 
My last stop was in historic Morristown.  I found two cemeteries.  The first was the town cemetery behind a church on a hill.  One of the grave stones had the name of Gaston, and said that one of the brothers resided in Portland, Oregon.  There is actually a small town outside of Portland CALLED Gaston that was settled in the 1800’s by a Joseph Gaston—yet another coincidence.  Who knew? The other cemetery was two blocks down the hill and is called the Pioneer Cemetery and is on the National Registry.  Several graves, bearing flags, were  Revolutionary War soldiers’ graves. 

Since I was travelling off the beaten path today, I decided to shoot in black & white for a change.   Here’s a little glimpse of the back roads.

Driving through America’s Heartland, I noticed something:  no matter how many hours I drove, I felt like giant screens along side of me kept playing the same scenery film loop.

 There are nearly 1400 miles between the western Nebraska border and my parents’ town in Ohio.  Omaha, 475 miles in, is the first “real” city.  Indianapolis is larger.  Columbus is Ohio’s largest city, and Interstate 70 wraps around it.  Finally, a familiar place where I knew the exit names and where the off ramps led.
 

Between these distractions, however, the surroundings were more “neutral,” consisting of the occasional wind mills, farm buildings, cows and lots and lots of corn. And corn, and some soybeans, and more and more corn.  This is where winter storms close the Interstate, and my mind drifted to listing the emergency items I keep in my car storage areas. Oddly, these states also have similar license plates--light blue on white—mind-numbing.

These photos were taken, one each, along my sleepy drive through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.  Admittedly, this is not my best work (at 90 degrees and 60 mph,) but it does look like there’s going to be a good corn crop this year…

Well, this has been a week.  I arrived at my parents’ just after the plumbers used up all of their well water to fix a bad pipe.  It has been up and down from there.

My father is not mobile yet, but the nurses who come in daily say that he is doing well.  We’ll be going to the doctor’s on Monday.  My mother is shrinking and “forgets” many things.  For the first time I see much of my grandmother in her.  It was good to see my brother, sister-in-law and nephew as they passed through the area.  He has been travelling to job interviews in Michigan, Illinois and the Carolinas. 

My days are full of care-taking right now, which is fine, why I’m here:  fixing breakfast, doing dishes, fixing lunch and dinner, doing laundry, grocery shopping, errands, cleaning, reminding my mother to take her medication, trying to understand what they’ll be capable of as opposed to where they are now. 

 
My coast life seems far away, but I’m tied to and worried about my commitments there.  I need to stretch my mind and time to get my own work done, too.  Believe it or not, I’m still feeling the effects of the time change, I think.  There is the added complication, as of yesterday, of my car and the wicked shimmy in the front end.  I’ll find out tomorrow if it’s the new tires that have fallen out of balance somehow, or if it’s transmission/engine related (please, let it be the tires, please.)

 
Last night I dreamed about lots of dogs around me, tails wagging, all different sizes and colors.  I don’t know what that means, but it was a happy little dream.  I don’t know what any of this means right now. Maybe as the days go by, and I get reacquainted with Ohio, life will also become less dreamlike and more focused.  

I am in Nebraska tonight, east but not east enough.  I had a tiring day Friday.  After getting the wrong mileage information off the internet (whaaaat?!?),  I found out that I would be arriving at my reservation destination around midnight.  No could do.  At 6:30 pm I was scrambling to find an affordable hotel room close to where I was in Wyoming. 

I walked into a Motel 6 that had a couple of rooms available.  A strange man who parked in the handicapped “grid” area in front of the door pushed in front of me as I waited at the counter, peeled off a few $20s from a giant wad of cash and said to the clerk, “This is for another week.”  I went out to my car and called other hotels while I wondered why the metal doors to the rooms in front of me had dents—lots of dents—in them:  SWAT team?  Baseball sized hail?  Baseball bat? 

Anyway, I found a hotel two buildings down, America’s Best Inn I think, and the front desk woman was wonderful.  She was really sweet, and the room was far nicer than I ever expected.  There were families and couples there, rather than America’s Most Wanted.  I picked up a few groceries across the street, took a hot shower and collapsed into a puffy king size bed.

Drove the rest of the way through Wyoming and am just under halfway through Nebraska.  Now I am, wait for it:  camping.  I’ve had this great little tent that is perfect for me.  It sets up in under 10 minutes, and I think I paid $12 for it.  When I called the campground earlier today to find out if they had spaces, I was surprised that they did on a Saturday in July.   I found out why when I arrived as I uttered these four-letter words to myself:  bugs and rain.  Everything around was fresh and soaking wet when I pulled in, and, of course the tent sites are on the mud, er, ground.  Well, it isn’t that bad.  There is grass, really.  Just nowhere to park without sinking up to your ankles in muddy water. 

The bugs, well.  The mosquitoes started just as I decided to set up the tent after all.  They’re small, but there are millions of them.  We’re under trees , next to a creek and surrounded by mud puddles.  The good news is that I hear lots of frogs in the creek who, I’m sure, feast on them, though I don’t know how the dozen or so in my tent will make it over there.  This is what I forgot about life in the Midwest.  Always carry OFF or Skin So Soft after Memorial Day.

Incidentally, the woman camping next to me (also travelling alone) has friends who live in Corvallis (OR,) and she and her husband lived in Rochester for four years while he got his Masters at RIT.  On her way to curate a show in Wyoming on “dressing cowboy,” she is a professor and has degrees in textiles and design.   She kindly helped me set up my tent.

So there are storm warnings out tonight, but the air doesn’t seem quite as oppressive as it was earlier, so maybe it won’t rain after all.  If a tornado does happen to pass through, maybe I’ll do a Dorothy and shave some travel time off my trip. 
(more photos later as I sort through)

I am on my way to Ohio.   Many people I know have had life-sized shake-ups in the past month, and I am among them.   My father had an accident at home---he’s out of the hospital and doing well---but he and my mother now have limited mobility and need some help.  I’m not sure how long I’ll be there. 

So here’s my third cross-country trip, and I’ll be trying to take photos as I go.  Today’s heat was brutal, and I wanted to gauge time and miles, so I didn’t do much sightseeing.  It did take me all day to get through Oregon, which is a huge state.   I ended up taking 26 from the coast to Interstate 84 out of Portland, across and down into Boise, ID this evening.  Somewhere around The Dalles, the lush, green of the rainy west changes to dry, rocky shades of brown.  The Columbia River has cut through the mountains and now pushes its way through dams on its way to the Pacific.  Scruffy bushes and pale yellow grasses struggle in the dirt.  I realized how opposite eastern and western Oregon are today. 

The Coast is temperate.  Though we set records these past couple of days, generally we hover in the 50’s and 60’s a good part of the year with, yes, a little rain.  Okay, a lot of rain.  But it makes everything green and rich and fresh. 

Eastern Oregon is extreme---basically high desert—arid and hot (101 degrees in Pendleton today) in the summer and bitter cold with blowing snow in the winter.  All along the road were “chain up” areas for the required tire chains during bad weather---that is when they keep the Interstate open.  It looks like harsh country.

I noticed a difference in culture, too, as evidenced in a few “subtle” things.   Flip flops out;  cowboy hats in.   Large spread horse and cattle ranches, rather than small farms.   Ah, and the radio commercials:  one for a children’s shooting contest (they provide guns, ammo and ear and eye protection—adults welcome) and another for “Jailbreak Bonds,” for when “you get into a little trouble,” and if you’re not sure how much trouble you’re in, they’ll do a “warrant check” for FREE.   If you feel like getting INTO some trouble, you can stop in Cowgirls Saloon:  bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, drinking, dancing.  No doubt the guy who had “Show me your boobs” painted on the tailgate of his pick-up has been there.

I also crossed over into Mountain Time, so it’s an hour later, according to my phone.  Time to get some rest and see what tomorrow brings.  (Many of the shots were taken through my car windows.  So the color may be slightly off.  Also sorry about the bug guts—too tired to Photoshop them out.)

Saturday night was CB Arts Association’s second annual Cake Walk.  There is so much talent, so much artistry in Cannon Beach, it boggles the brain.   Oooos and aaaahs gave way to competition, and the winners were so happy (screaming, jumping up and down, etc.) that calorie counts couldn’t possibly dampen the victories.

Thank you to these restaurants for their generous donations of beautiful edible art to our event:  The Bistro, Cannon Beach Bakery, the Driftwood, Newman’s at 988, the Wayfarer, the Lumberyard, the Stephanie Inn, Waves of Grain Bakery and Season’s Cafe.  Lori McKean, food writer/pastry chef/friend, also made a beautiful torte that my company, GlynisArt donated.

Feast your eyes on this. . .


the Bistro


Cannon Beach Bakery


the Wayfarer Restaurant


Newman's at 988


the Lumberyard Grille


the Driftwood Inn Restaurant


Waves of Grain Bakery


Lori McKean


Season's Cafe


the Stephanie Inn

I don’t know if happy hours are things of the past, or if they are more of an east coast thing.  I remember Friday happy hours with friends as almost routine.   Working for neighborhood groups, Friday afternoons would slow down---except for the tool libraries---as City and State workers ended their work weeks with long lunches or early weekends.   

We would meet at Bay Goodman Pizza or Hitchcock’s, Water Street Grill or a wine tasting at one of the hotels, or Remington’s, Johnny’s or Merchants Grill—comfortable places with good friends.   “Happy hour,” for me, conjures up feelings of camaraderie and relaxation rather than discounted well drinks.  In fact, I would often drink tonic & lemon or ginger ale or Coke, chatting with colleagues, the bartenders, neighbors, soaking up the atmosphere.

I had a long day yesterday that began half an hour late with me trying to find my shoes.  At  4:30 pm I was in Yachats again, finished with deliveries and sales calls and preparing myself for the 3 ½ hour drive back up the coast.  I decided to take my half sandwich from lunch to the little scenic area.   I rolled down the windows, popped open a Tab, soaked up some atmosphere and listened to the waves and breeze.  Aahhhhh.

This was totally the happiest hour of the day.

(If you are in Cannon Beach tonight, stop by the CB Gallery in Midtown for the “Sea Creatures” show opening and our Cake Walk.  Last year’s Walk was a hoot, and we have some beautiful desserts donated by CB’s top pastry chefs as prizes.

Also, you can catch some of my “mini-musings” on Twitter.  Follow me at glynisart.)