Midwest Morning Musings

 A young deer leapt out onto the two lane road that stretched out before me. I applied the pickup truck brakes, slowly bringing the truck to a complete stop. The deer was lit with mid-morning sun that was behind me. It just looked at me. I looked down the road -- no cars were were coming from the other direction. I checked my mirror. No vehicles were approaching from behind. I inched forward, willing the little deer to move. It did, so that it was right in front of me. And then another appeared from the same direction the first had come and the both scampered across the road and down the sloping roadside into the woods. I eased off the brake and resumed my meandering drive through west Central Ohio.

I hadn't been to my home state since January. On March 1, Nancy had a stroke and then shortly after that the pandemic shut everything down. Now things were well enough all the way around that I could make a quick trip and visit some family and enjoy being back in Ohio. Mys sister Linda is selling her house and had my mother's small secretary desk and rocking chair from the home we grew up in on Eureka Avenue in Columbus, Ohio for me to bring back to Indiana. So I gassed up my little GMC and headed east on the interstate early on Friday morning.

After a nice lunch with Linda and my sister Kathleen and her husband Paul, I loaded the truck with the desk and rocker, along with some boxes of tools that were Dad's, and some other miscellaneous memorabilia. Then Linda, Kathleen, Paul, and I retired to Linda's screen porch and chatted for hours. Sister Julie called from her home on top of a mesa in Colorado. It was a wonderful time of memories and family.

At 8:15 Saturday morning, I fired up the Canyon and headed out. It was a crisp, cool almost autumn morn, so I decided to take backroads at least part of the way home. I turned onto Orange Road, which when I was a kid on the Hilltop area of Columbus seemed terribly far away when we would travel up to Orange Road Friends Church for Quarterly Meeting or other services. It's all of twenty miles. Orange Road now is lined by houses and tall trees and was very peaceful with the shade covering the road. Then north on Liberty Road, west on Herriott, south on Ohio 42, southwest on 161, southwest on 4. "I know Ohio like the back of my hand," to quote a line from a song by Over the Rhine. 

I reveled in the feel of familiar roads under the truck tires. Roads I'd traveled over many times since I was child. Towns, small and smaller. New California. Plain City. Irwin. Mechanicsburg. Winding byways, gentle hills, woods, farmsteads, soybeans starting their change from deep green to yellow, cornstalks likewise losing their vibrant green. The sun taking on a more autumnal slant, lengthening the shadows. And me, tooling along in my truck, my payload of family in the bed.

I looked in the mirror and saw the rocker, on its side, safely bungeed in the back. I thought of all us kids, and grandkids, and great-grandkids who had rocked in it. How Kathleen had stood on one of the runners and broken it and how careful craftsman hands had crafted an identical runner that has now been a part of the rocker for so long you can't tell (well, we kids can because we remember) which is original and which is the "new" one. I wondered who in the family would have it and Mom's desk after me. 

I also thought of our old MG that Dad and Mom had driven over some of those roads. Just out for a ride. It was resting in my garage in Indiana -- a 1955 (the same age as the MG) Ohio road map in the glove box. The roads I was driving were all on that map. Not so for the interstates I traveled over yesterday.

As I drove, the sun rising, the pale fullish moon fading in the western sky, the country smells wafting in through the slightly open window, I was at peace. Grateful. For young deer who caused me to stop. For family that embraces me physically and emotionally. For roads to wander and enjoy. For being a person of this place. A Midwestern man.  

Ohio: "I know Ohio like the back of my hand..."

Hillsboro, OH 1978

I was at home for a little while last week.  Not the home where I live, but the home where a part of my heart still resides.  Though I have been gone from Ohio longer than I lived there, it is still my place.  When I crossed into Ohio under the arch at the Indiana border on Interstate 70 there was an immediate feeling of homecoming.

Weird, huh, considering that I crossed under that arch into Indiana in 1978 and never moved back.

On my journey across the Buckeye state, I saw historical sites.  Not the kind marked with plaques -- rather my own personal historical sites.  Vandalia where some of my cousins and friends lived.  London where I spent a hot Ohio summer landscaping the year my best friend Greg killed himself.  Columbus where I lived until I was 24.  Though I was zipping by all these on the interstate, their neighborhoods, houses I lived in, schools I attended, friends I had, girls I fell in love with, jobs I had all floated by.  Headed toward the eastern border, I spotted the place where Marlon Troyer once stopped the car to scrape up a raccoon carcass for a study he was doing in biology class in college.  Floods of memories washed over me.  The roads I travelled as a young man.  The family reunions.  Church softball games.  Sunday evenings spent in Quaker meeting.

Here past the edge of town,
this one as well as any other
in the Adirondacks, the trees lock arms
and lean into each other like
relatives at a family reunion.
This is some history; listen to the names,
Sugar Maple, Black Spruce, Wild Cherry,
Sweet Birch, the old White Oaks. On and
on into the hillsides until my tongue rolls
and I whisper Ohio, imagining this is what it was
one hundred years ago, imagining this is what
whispered in the ear of Tecumseh, who fought for it
for twenty years, knowing when he started he couldn't
win, but who fought and lost anyway, imagining
this is what whispered to my great grandfather
Marvin Peabody, when he dropped down out of the
Northeast. Who left when he heard his neighbors
unfolding the arms of trees with axes and bucksaws
and headed west, rubbing the fine dust from his eyes.
But came back when he saw that like Ohio, that too
was lost. He came back I suppose because he had
nowhere else to go. Or maybe he just liked the name
Ohio. And why not. Whisper it now, whisper
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio, and amid the miles of concrete,
under the culverts dumping waste, around the smokestacks
over by the river, a breeze picks up
sending a ripple, like a litany
through the family of tree.

("Reunion" by Robert Kinsley, from Endangered Species. © Orchises Press, 1989. (buy now))

...maybe he just liked the name
Ohio. And why not. Whisper it now, whisper
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio, ...

I do like that name.  I love that place.  It's still my home.  And I still cry when I hear Karin Berquist sing "Ohio"

Rooted and Grounded

I am back home. Home, for me, is the Midwest. In general. Specifically, it's Ohio and Indiana. Ohio is where I grew up and it is still home to me in a way that is very spiritual and yet somehow undefinable. I have been gone from there now more years (barely) than I lived there, but whenever I cross the Ohio-Indiana line and see the arch proclaiming "Welcome to Ohio" or hear Karin Berqquist sing "Ohio" ("I know Ohio like the back of my hand") a sense of melancholy homecoming settles over me.

Just as real, but less melancholic, was the feeling I had flying into Indianapolis yesterday after almost 12 days in Colorado and New Mexico.

Those were glorious days -- vistas that can barely be imagined. In Colorado, I visited my sister Julie and her husband Dave who now live in Montrose. Julie has wanted to live in Colorado ever since she and I were there at Young Life's Silver Cliff Ranch in the late 70s (she as a kid and me as a leader). She says (and I have no reason to doubt her -- knowing both my younger and older self) that as my youngest sister I made her go. But she loved it. And now she and Dave live there. We visited Black Canyon, Ridgway, Ouray and other fascinating places. I took a ton of photographs.

Likewise in Santa Fe and Chimayo. Skies wide open, wispy cloud formations, amazingly colorful desert flowers. What great light.

But. But in the same way that St. Paul tells us that we are to be "rooted and grounded" in [Christ's] love so that we might be filled with the fullness of God, I find that I am rooted and grounded in the Midwestern soil. It speaks to my soul with its lush greenness, multiplicity of flowers and grasses, tall trees, and manageable vistas.

Likewise its people -- generally polite, often understated (if asked how something was, we'll say "Pretty good" or "Not bad" as a high compliment), deeply spiritual -- even if we disagree about what it means to be spiritual. These people, like the land at its best, reflect the goodness of God's love. At our worst, we are like a wicked tornado, shredding everything in our path (and some of that has gone on, I hear, among a gathering of -- of all people -- Quakers this week. I am glad I was in New Mexico for that!).

Regardless. These are my people. This is my home. This is my vision of Heaven -- both here on earth and in Eternity. Good hearted women and men rejoicing (though subtly) in the blessings of God, land abundant and fertile, life a wee bit slower (when I allow it to be), and God feeling near.

I am rooted and grounded in this place.

I hope you feel that way about your place. God be praised. And it's good to be home.

-- Brent