4/11/99
I grew up in the suburban countryside of aging farmland, stands of Sugar Maples, and former city-dwellers finding refuge on a few acres of reclaimed corn fields. My father, an engineer, and my mother, still attending art school, bought a freshly built ranch house connected to Spieth Road by a two hundred yard gravel driveway. They moved in and called it "Home." It was forty-five minutes into Cleveland where my dad found a job, twenty minutes to Medina to pick up a quart of milk, and fifteen minutes walking down the road and back to relieve the oppressive stuffiness of constantly being indoors. Being nature lovers, they began planting trees: Apples; Pears; Plums; Persimmons; Black Walnuts; and hundreds of Eastern White Pines. I arrived four years later, their first-born.
Today, like most days, my mother has taken me out on a "walk." We are getting our exercise in the manner of a hamster--going around and around, never seeing any new scenery, never meeting any other people, never really getting anywhere. We started out by trying to break up the monotony of being cooped up in our house, but by now it has become just another part of our daily routine.
Normally we head west down Spieth Road and turn back when my toddler's legs have had enough, and today is no exception. We are now on our way back home, walking on the road itself, always facing traffic even though there is no traffic to watch out for. Along the north side of the road is an empty field, thick with thistles and wild rose bushes. There are no sewer lines this far out in the country, so drainage ditches line the roads everywhere we go. None of our neighbors mow in the ditches, instead allowing marshy plants like cat-o'nine-tails and milkweeds to multiply in the wet soil.
Despite the abundant plant life the land feels empty: no one has put their house closer than one hundred yards to the road, and even the trees are at least ten feet back to avoid interfering with the power lines overhead. Walking farther, we pass the white barn and pastures that mark the Mohler's dairy farm. Their cows amuse me to no end: I am three years old and love all animals indiscriminately. Sadly, they are on the wrong side of an electric fence and my mother urges me along.
Once we have left the cows behind, the road again feels strangely deserted, and we quicken our pace a little. Across the double yellow line, on the south side of the road, lies a farmer's field, empty save for a few dead corn stalks. As we press, on I stumble in a hole in the road where the asphalt has begun to disintegrate, but my mother is there to lend me her hand and help me along. Now on our left is a small white house whose contents are unknown to me. It lays much farther back than most of the houses on our road, sitting completely alone across a large, grassy lawn. The large green strip down the middle of the gravel driveway indicates that it does not get much use these days; nature has taken over as it is gradually reclaimed by crabgrass. The owners are probably elderly shut-ins, as are most of our neighbors. A few people in our neighborhood commute to work during the day as my father does, but I am the only child on my street.
Next along the north side of our road is an old, abandoned barn, whose doors have long since rotted off and whose roof is in the process of collapsing in on itself. It would provide little protection for any farm machinery now; instead it serves as a shelter for innumerable mice, raccoon, opossum, and other woodland creatures. Its sides are covered with some sort of vine intent on returning the barn's ancient timbers to the dirt that they came from. We turn away from this reminder of times long-gone and head across the street to the edge of our property. We are almost home.
Each side of our lot is lined by three rows of Eastern White Pines that were planted as windbreaks, and we jump over the ditch and plod across our lawn. My mother likes to see the wildflowers grow, so she has convinced my father to let our front lawn go unmown during the spring, though there aren't any wildflowers yet. The gravel driveway bisects our land: to the left are a few Pear trees; to the right, where we are now standing, lie the pond and apple trees. Ahead is our house, painted beige like many of the new houses being built in our area. We walk around the pond, noting where the Muskrats have been burrowing in the mud. Past the pond lie the apple trees; still too early for blossoms. At last we reach our house, but continue walking around our house to the back yard. At one end is the garden, but there are no signs of life yet. We have been too busy to plant any of the usual squash, zucchini, tomato, and green pepper plants. The backyard is now the dull brownish-green color of grass lying dormant, but in a few months it will burst forth with light, undergoing the almost unnatural transformation from a plot of dead grass into a field of acid-yellow dandelions, each flower dazzling the eye, our entire backyard glowing more brightly than the sun. For now our backyard simply dissolves into several acres of empty land that my parents have allowed to lie fallow.
In the end we go back inside our house, but I still stare out the front windows looking down our driveway, past the saplings not much taller than I am, and down to the road. Cars rarely pass by. I'm not really looking for anything, because I haven't yet realized that there is anything to look for. Being unable to recognize emptiness or desertion, feeling lonely or depressed, being adjusted better to ideas than to people: these are concepts that trouble me as I am growing up, and this is where I grew up: decaying farms; overgrown fields; empty houses; a neighborhood lacking in warmth, almost post-apocalyptic in the absence of human presence.