Six Days

I was in Ohio last week,  spending time with my mom, and one of the things we usually do when I visit is make a trip to Amish country.  There are several country stores in that area that Mom likes, and there is also a little Amish diner where we have lunch -- $4.95 for an egg salad sandwich and potato chips.  I happened upon the pictures you see above.

A mere six days later I was back home in the Pacific Northwest and made the pictures you see below. Several friends and I had snowshoed up into the Mt. Stuart range in Central Washington, hiking a trail that took us up, up, up above treeline, where views extended at least 100 miles.

It's a bit unreal to me that, in the space of less than a week, I was in two places, so very unlike one another. Neither place was better than the other. They were simply different.

 

Barn Art

I headed out to the barn the other morning to feed Pumpkin the Goat, Smokey the Sheep, and our three hens and one rooster (the feathered creatures do not have names.)  It was  foggy out, and still.  Even Pumpkin and Smokey, who usually bleat or baah when they see me coming -- they want to encourage me to get a move on and serve up their grain, pronto -- respected the quiet.

As I approached the barn, I noticed the elements of the photograph you see above.  There is an external post that is part of the support structure for the sliding barn door, and we’ve hung an old bike from that post, creating what I guess might be considered a funky piece of decorative “art.”  I pulled out the small camera that is nearly always in my jeans pocket and, as is my habit, made a visual note of the foggy scene.

I was reminded of a couple of images I shot several months ago when I was back home in Ohio visiting my mother.

Mom and I were driving through a rural part of the state, on our way to eat at a plain little Amish lunch counter that my mom enjoys very much.  For about $3.95 there,  one can get a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of soup, but it’s not an inexpensive meal that makes the lunch counter a favorite for us.  Rather, we’re drawn by the place’s unpretentious, country simplicity.  That lunch counter is a good place for Mom and me to reminisce,  and to retell the sweet, often-repeated family stories that we share every time I visit.

There is also serious barn art to be found in Ohio and, when I drive my mother around, I pull over often to photograph perfectly maintained, new-ish Amish barns with clean and straight architectural lines and fresh white paint; or, more often,  I take pictures  of barns and farmhouses whose better days are past.

Mom is always good-natured about the stops I make, and, in fact, I suspect she’d be a little disappointed if I did not see things in my old home state that I’m moved to photograph.

Barn bling:  I admit that I’m a sucker for it.
 

A Trip Back Home

It’s a little difficult for me to believe -- though the year 1972 is clearly written on my negative filing sheet -- that it was 40 years ago now that I shot the photograph you see above.

I was a freshman at the Ohio State University, already wildly passionate about taking pictures, and certain that photography was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was taking all the photo and journalism courses the school offered, shooting for the OSU student newspaper, and working part-time for the Columbus bureau of the Associated Press. But, more importantly (I know now with the benefit of hindsight,) I was also giving myself personal assignments, like coverage of a Memorial Day parade in my small Ohio home town.

That practice -- to see and document everyday life around me -- was the best photographic education I could have gotten...and it has become a lifelong habit.

I was in Ohio last week visiting my mother. I planted flowers in her yard and did other odd jobs around my childhood home. Since Mom no longer drives, I also took her places she wanted to go.

It happened that my week back home coincided with the Memorial Day holiday, and, though I always want Mom to set the agenda for what we do when I visit, I hoped that one of the things I’d be able to do would be to revisit the Memorial Day parade.

For my post today, I decided I’d share a photo diary of my trip, with short captions.

Thanks for coming along.

My mom is of a generation that sometimes refers to the Memorial Day holiday as "Decoration Day." She had me take her on a two-day road trip to the part of Ohio where she grew up so she could visit the cemetery where my grandparents are buried, and place flowers on their graves.

There was a Civil War reenactment going on in one of the small towns Mom and I visited, and this fellow was one of the participants.

I took Mom to the Sunday morning service at the church she and my grandparents attended for many years, and, just before the service began, I quietly made this photograph of a sweet-faced child in the congregation.

My mom gets a good-natured kick out of my photo habit, and when she and I travel together, Mom has become accustomed to me suddenly pulling the car off to the side of the road and jumping out, camera in hand, when I see the elements of a photograph....which is exactly what I did when I saw this sunset.

Monday morning, Memorial Day, I was up early and out on quiet, deserted streets for an exercise walk when I came upon this scene near the old post office in my home town. Several hours later the high school marching band, veterans groups, and other participants in the Memorial Day parade would pass this same spot, bringing noise and human energy to the place I had first experienced in silence.

I loved the wonderful light on the face of this somber gentleman at the Memorial Day ceremony.

Lots of the folks who attended the parade were dressed in star-spangled costumes, and that included four-legged, furry types.

Calling Mom

My mother is a retired Ohio school teacher, and, before I dial her number each evening for our regular-as-clockwork phone conversations, I often feel like I need to do my homework.

To be specific, Mom, who is now in her 80’s, taught vocal music, and the homework I speak of isn’t that I should study up on the history of Bach’s choral works, or perhaps get into a talk-with-Mom frame of mind by listening to a CD of the King’s College Choir of London performing a piece by John Rutter.

No, my homework (at this time of year) is that I should probably get on the web and see what Mom’s beloved Cleveland Indians are doing (the team is referred to as “The Tribe,” in Northern Ohio parlance.) If I am calling during the winter months, heaven forbid I should dial Mom during overtime of a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball game.

Because this is Mother’s Day weekend, I thought I’d post the image you see here today, one I did recently of my mom’s favorite flower, the calla lily. Next month I’ll go visit my mother and during my stay at her house I’ll shower in a bathroom that has calla lily wall paper and eat meals on calla lily plates at a table decorated with a calla lily table cloth.

When we talk on the phone, Mom tells me again and again how much fun we’ll have during my visit. I go see Mom at least twice a year, always with the intention of doing fixit jobs around her house, but the scenario is invariably the same: She’ll take the shovel or hammer out of my hand, give me a glass of lemonade, and tell me to sit down with her and listen to good music. She'll remind me that the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music is nearby. Mom will insist that I've worked enough for the day and suggest that we go to a concert.

Of course we’ll also watch baseball, lots of baseball. Mom’s already bought us tickets to an Indians game.

Thirty-five-years ago when my dad died, you see, Mom started paying attention to sports -- I suspect because my brother, sister and I were fans, and perhaps Mom felt she needed to take up a bit of the role a father normally plays -- and today my Mother’s fandom far exceeds that of her kids. Two weeks ago when The Tribe was out here to play Seattle’s Mariners -- the game didn’t even start till 10:05 PM Ohio time -- Mom was glued to her television set, watching every pitch and at-bat. I watched too, though about 8:30 my time (11:30 in Ohio) I was tired and went to bed...knowing my night-owl Mom could tell me the final score when we talked the next day.

Mom also knows the nicknames of the athletes on the Cleveland sports teams, and it makes me giggle to hear my sweet, senior citizen mother refer to one basketball player, not by his first name (Anderson,) or even his last name (Varejao,) but rather Mom, like other true Cleveland fans, calls him “Wild Thing.”

Simple Gifts

I suppose it might sound a little surprising when I say that I admire the craftsmanship and art that can be created by someone who is skilled in fine woodwork, since my own abilities are pretty much limited to what I learned in Shop Class way back in seventh grade. Yes, I can handle a power saw and most basic hand tools. I can usually fix stuff that breaks around our house. But fine woodworking? No way.

Mostly, I have to admit that I just don’t seem to have the patience to shape, sand and finish a piece of wood to make it a thing of beauty, something that one could call “art.” Yes, I can and do work for hours or days or weeks on a photograph -- no problem for me in showing patience there. But could I ever make a piece of furniture or construct even the most rustic of dwellings? Nope. ‘Fraid not.

I made a trip to Ohio last week to visit my mother, and one of the things I proposed she and I do was to take a road trip to Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, because for some time I’ve wanted to photograph the furniture and clean-lined dwellings of the Shakers. Mom loves “Early American” furniture, and is always up for anything that sounds like an Adventure. So off we went, leaving Mom’s home in Northeast Ohio and driving in the general direction of Lexington, six hours away. We listened to CDs of the music of Aaron Copland on the car stereo, since that composer incorporated a number of Shaker tunes (like the hymn “Simple Gifts”) in his works.

" 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round right."

When we arrived at Pleasant Hill, Mom and I wandered around the village and were gently, visually transported back into the 1800’s. Though the Shaker community of Kentucky died-out in the early 1900’s and for a while Pleasant Hill fell into disrepair, the village has been restored by hardworking locals. There are tours of the Shaker village buildings and demonstrations of craft-work like handmade brooms and classic Shaker bentwood boxes.

After making that long road trip, it seemed that Mom and I did indeed “find ourselves in the place just right.”

Tour de Ohio

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Ohio with my Mom. I did a few fixit jobs in Mom’s house, planted flowers in her yard, and Mom and I took mini-roadtrips together through the Ohio countryside.

Mom no longer drives, yet she loves getting out and going places. Whenever I visit, I get into what I think of as my “Driving Miss Daisy” frame of mind, taking Mom wherever she wants to go: The town where she grew up; the cemetery where my grandparents are buried; the small town where Mom and Dad lived when they were first married; an Amish village where Mom and I enjoy stopping for lunch. This past weekend we also took in a Memorial Day parade.

These are nostalgic trips, and sweet.

I know I'm fortunate to have such a swell traveling companion.

Driving Miss Daisy

Because she’s experienced vision problems in the past few years and my mother can no longer drive her car, a visit back home for me now means I do my “Driving Miss Daisy” thing, taking Mom to some of the places she enjoys but can no longer visit on her own.

I was in Ohio last week and my agenda for the trip was to rake leaves in Mom’s yard and do other fall/pre-winter home maintenance jobs, but Mom had other plans in mind. She’d allow me to rake for an hour or so, then she’d stand in front of me in the yard and say: “I don’t want you to work all the time you’re here. Let’s go someplace fun.”

So, as we nearly always do when I’m back home, we got in the car and drove to Holmes County, Ohio’s “Amish Country.” We poked around in a store that caters to the Amish -- the store is full of candles, oil lamps, wood stoves, and other non-electrical items the Amish use -- and we had lunch at our usual spot, a little country diner that serves big, working-person plates of food for small, middle-America prices (check total for two lunches: $5.)

Another day we visited Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, one of the schools where Mom studied. I took photographs of amazing fall colors outside the Conservatory building, and, as students strolled by, I joked with Mom that I could remember a time when I was in high school and Oberlin students seemed mature, sophisticated, and artist-fringe-intellectual to me. All the students I saw last week, however, looked so very young... my joke’s unstated punch line being that either I’ve gotten much older and my perceptions have changed, or Oberlin College now has a student body comprised of 13-year-olds.

Goin' Home

My mother is of the generation that refers to the Memorial Day holiday as “Decoration Day,” a solemn weekend in America when living family members take flowers to cemeteries where beloved relatives -- particularly veterans -- are buried. Leah and I were in Ohio this past weekend visiting our parents, and I drove Mom to the farm country where my grandparents are buried and Mom and I placed flowers on the graves.

Ohio’s farmland is stunning at this time of year. The fields of corn, wheat and hay are dripping with fertility in the humid June air, and a thunderstorm (Leah and I experience lots of rain where we live in the Pacific Northwest but we rarely see thunder and lightening) moved over us when we happened to be out traveling in the car. There was one bolt of lightening in particular that spanned the entire sky as far as we could see from east to west, and the accompanying boom of thunder made us jump way out of our seats.

There’s a palpable sense of history and Americana to be seen in the Midwest. The landscape there for me is full of visual clues that I’m most certainly in the land of my farming grandparents, and of the generations who settled there before them.

I don't know who it was who came up with that well-worn phrase: “You can’t go home again,” but I beg to differ.