Sunsets from Ohio
Saturday, April 25, 2009
I have been in Ohio since last week. My mother has been ill and had surgery, so I am here to help my parents until next week when my brother and niece arrive.
This is farm country for the most part, interspersed with small towns that have seen better days and are suffering. The people are a hardy lot--farmers, coal miners, steel workers of early 1900's immigrant stock. As are my relatives.
I went out today for a little while. There are other places that I hope to re-visit and will post later. This is bittersweet for me. This place is familiar, and yet what I see is either deteriorating or the victim of "progress." The memories are flooding back with the familiar places, yet many of my relatives are gone. The architecture is different than on the Coast, and I was thinking about how comforting it is to again see these 100-year old homes and barns and brick storefronts and churches. And yet, many have been abandoned or are in the pergatory before the bulldozer. Part of me wants to live in one of these houses, surrounded by big trees and acres of former pasture, sitting on the porch with some iced tea, looking out over the rolling foothills of the Appalachians. I would get a dog and maybe even a cat. But I think I would be sad, knowing that it used to be different--cleaner, no modular homes on the next hill, no remnants of a horrific flood three years ago, well-kept storefronts owned by proud second or third generation family businesses.
It is definitely a different place. I thought I would be ready to run back to CB by now, but the memories and architecture are slowing me down. As I photographed the sunset tonight from my parents' front lawn, I listened to sounds I don't hear in Cannon Beach--cows mooing, tree frogs, a mid-west bird assortment (none of them seagulls.) Tomorrow is another day.
I have been in Ohio since last week. My mother has been ill and had surgery, so I am here to help my parents until next week when my brother and niece arrive.
This is farm country for the most part, interspersed with small towns that have seen better days and are suffering. The people are a hardy lot--farmers, coal miners, steel workers of early 1900's immigrant stock. As are my relatives.
I went out today for a little while. There are other places that I hope to re-visit and will post later. This is bittersweet for me. This place is familiar, and yet what I see is either deteriorating or the victim of "progress." The memories are flooding back with the familiar places, yet many of my relatives are gone. The architecture is different than on the Coast, and I was thinking about how comforting it is to again see these 100-year old homes and barns and brick storefronts and churches. And yet, many have been abandoned or are in the pergatory before the bulldozer. Part of me wants to live in one of these houses, surrounded by big trees and acres of former pasture, sitting on the porch with some iced tea, looking out over the rolling foothills of the Appalachians. I would get a dog and maybe even a cat. But I think I would be sad, knowing that it used to be different--cleaner, no modular homes on the next hill, no remnants of a horrific flood three years ago, well-kept storefronts owned by proud second or third generation family businesses.
It is definitely a different place. I thought I would be ready to run back to CB by now, but the memories and architecture are slowing me down. As I photographed the sunset tonight from my parents' front lawn, I listened to sounds I don't hear in Cannon Beach--cows mooing, tree frogs, a mid-west bird assortment (none of them seagulls.) Tomorrow is another day.
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