Spring cleaning

Mom subjected us to spring cleaning every year.  Grandma came down to help. Dad disappeared to his workshop. Everything was washed.  I especially remember the walls and the ceiling.  The walls were washed from the bottom up.  From the top down would leave dribble marks in the dust on the walls that could never be eradicated.  That’s what the grown up’s said.

We washed the outside of everything.

It could involve standing on ladders.

We washed windows.

We had no fireplace.

Is this little girl out of her mind?

Empty all the cupboards and wash everything that is in them.

Wash the inside of the cupboards.

Stay out of the way.

More windows.

What was I thinking.

Then the regular cleaning.  You know.  Floors, dusting, bathrooms.  Laura said the best thing about spring cleaning is it must be spring.

Some things never change.

First coronet

Disclaimer:  post written by a tin eared grandma.

At the end of last semester Uncle Tom and I went to Laura’s band performance.  There are two bands in her elementary school, the Tuesday/Thursday and the Wednesday/Friday.  Each has sixty five or so members.  At the end of the performance the band teacher said we heard the group all playing the same note; next semester they will learn harmony.

Uncle Tom said that little girl plays a nice trumpet; with a little more direction she could be even better.  Now, Uncle Tom knows how music is made.  He played trumpet in his own high school band back in 1960-something and he never hesitated to send her back to replay the last ten minutes of her twenty minutes per evening of practice, or make a change in her breathing, or whatever one does to a trumpet.

For Christmas he gave her a music stand for practice.  “She sits on her bed, looking down at that music, and that’s no way to play a trumpet!”  So, every evening, after the dishes, we are treated to twenty minutes of trumpet notes floating down the stairs.  I enjoy it, and often can name the tune.  Sometimes Uncle Tom remarks on the music and goes up to make a correction.

Laura took some teasing at the supper table recently; apparently Emily and Hamilton, who also play musical instruments in the high school band, realized Laura has put in a lot of time on a single piece lately.  Uncle Tom cut off their teasing; even if Laura didn’t play a good little trumpet, she’s his favorite great niece. “Tell them what you’re doing, Laura.”

“I’m trying out for first coronet.”

Some time was spent explaining to grandma that a trumpet can play the coronet part.  Several little trumpet players were given the music and there will be a tryout soon.  The piece is called Snap, Crackle, Bop.

Hamilton teased Laura, she was challenging the other players.

“No I’m not; I’ll just play it the best.”

I told Laura it was admirable to strive to do her very best.

“Yes, Gramma.  I want to sit in first chair, too.”

Cabin Fever, yesterday

Glorious day, yesterday.  The Peninsula Chamber picked a fine Saturday for their annual Cabin Fever shop stroll. Jan and I started at ten, when the shops open.  I took my camera in hope of finding a more spring like picture for my header. We started at the west end of Main Street and worked our way east to Mill Street.

Jan has never been to Ohio Hardwood Furniture, and wanted a good look at the Adirondack chairs.  I was only window shopping, then located the perfect bench for our kitchen table, and ordered it.  She found the perfect Adirondack chair, in lime green.  I didn’t think to unholster my camera, but look at their web site and see beautiful furniture, made in Ohio.  You can get to it from Explore Peninsula, under the shopping tab.

Great start; we headed down the hill.

Next stop was Yellow Creek Trading Company.  The building has housed several shops in my twenty five year history with the village; the building’s history goes back to canal days.  The front window carries a Salada Tea logo; left from the general store days.  The original floors bear every sign of use; I love the tin repairs.

I completely forgot the turn into the Log Cabin Gallery (sorry Diane), but her eclectic collection of art and artists is on the Chamber web site.

Next LeSeraglio.  Currently a fair trade importer here; there have been any number of shops in the building.  Once it was a wonderful book store, but we know what happens to those.  In the summer there are tables and chairs on the patio, offset by their wonderful red door.

Next stop the Downtown Emporium, a collectables and antique haven.  I picked up one of the few remaining Blue Santas from the time they were recreated in Peninsula.  Long story.  If I could still dance the night away it might be in these slippers!

Around the corner to the Peninsula Art Academy, Elements Gallery and the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad station.  A fair amount of traffic at the station, so early in the day.

First to the Art Academy, scene of little kid art pandemonium last summer. I love this place from the front door to the back and back again.  I stopped for a good look at the glass man.

Across Mill Street to Elements Gallery.  Steve and Deb put together an entirely new interior to the gallery last summer.  Their daughter left a door for the resident mouse.

Home again, home again, for a very late lunch, but a stop at the golf course for a new picture of the lake and the tree.  The sun may have been shining, but the grass is not green enough or the lake blue enough to make a replacement grade picture.

Hoping to join us for lunch.

A day and a half trip

I went back to Coalmont, Pennsylvania (population 105) early in March; my so help me last trip up the long hill that is town, from the Dudley Methodist Cemetery.  I communed with the row of Lytle graves, the parents, the siblings and spouses—but not my grandfather.  Blanchard C. (Uncle Pete) and his wife Elizabeth, have the massive pink monument. Uncle Pete brought my grandfather home from Pueblo, Colorado in 1930, to be buried. It came to me with a smile: George Marion is there, somewhere.   No headstone, and too bad for him all the records were lost when the postmistress retired.

I drug Linda with me this time.  She needed a break from custom rugs, and was glad to get on board.  I booked a double in an old timey motel in Bedford.  My B&B from last year cancelled my reservation in anticipation of one of those blizzards.  My forecast was for the storm to go north to New England and south to Maryland, and it did exactly that.

Blue sky in Bedford

We ate lunch at the Bedford Diner, and set out to look at the town.  Downtown was short work, and Linda, turning around the walking map she took at the motel, found a notice for the National Museum of the American Coverlet.  

Go big or go home, we said, and worked our way two blocks over to Juliana Street.

The museum’s directors, Melinda and Laszlo Zonger, were off assaying a new coverlet find; we found the doors locked with a charming note announcing their return would be an hour or so earlier.  They did return before we gave over sitting on the steps; the rest of our afternoon was immediately engaged.

The opening scene was charming light comedy.  Mr. Zonger, whose name I did not know, returned eight dollars from my twenty, as we were senior citizens, like him.  He would let us in free if I could tell him his name, the most common in Hungary.  I failed.  His name is Laszlo.  Linda’s name had been spoken, Melinda said she is a Linda, also, and we had a famous beginning.

As I looked around the little office, waiting for Mr. Zonger to start his tour, Linda mentioned she grew up in Scipio, New York. It was said, when her parents bought the big 1800’rds farm house, it once housed a coverlet weaver. She once had an opportunity to buy a coverlet attributed to Scipio, but let it slip away.  However, she heard recently a Scipio coverlet is again available and probably going to the historical collection of a local church.

Such a discussion of the limited number of Scipio coverlets known followed! Melinda went off to the storage area to bring out the Scipio coverlets while Laszlo took us on the tour.  Melinda is a weaver.  I do not know Laszlo’s credentials.  He was extremely knowledgeable about home weaving and textile production from colonial times to the end of the Jacquard loom period in the mid nineteenth century. Like a textbook, he was.

Now, Linda and I both have knocked around the weaving world for some time.  I used up to eight harness looms, made and sold overshot coverlets.  Linda weaves art rugs to stand on.  We know a lotta stuff.  As Laszlo worked us through to the decline of the Jacquard as home industry in the mid-nineteenth century I ventured that as the Jaquard weaving heads moved west and the operating punch cards were worn and torn, the designs produced became more and more fantastical.  “Where?” Laszlo demanded.  “Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota,” I replied.  “There are no known Jacquard coverlets from Wisconsin and Minnesota!”  I shut up and listened to the tour.

In a room that featured Jacquard floor coverings Linda ventured that floor rugs originated as bed coverings in Europe. Laszlo immediately set her straight!  Bed coverings are bed coverings, floor coverings are rugs. Linda, too retreated.  We did need to get outside and enjoy our tour experience in the privacy of the car.

But then we reached the storage room and Melinda’s collection of Scipio coverlets.  It was worth the wait, and the Lindas exchanged information about the search for the missing Scipio coverlet. I liked seeing old coverlets in the overshot patterns I used.

This Scipio Jaquard weaver was a woman, one of perhaps two known women Jacquard weavers.  Charlotte Bryan inherited the business from her father.

 We spent another pleasant hour examining the museum’s collection.  It was past closing time; we started off to the diner for supper.  Two blocks and we went back to retrieve Linda’s coffee cup. We met the Zonger’s at the door, on their way to our motel to drop it off.

My problem with Catcher in the Rye

        

I finished reading the book last night.  It took me three nights; I couldn’t just skim it.  I started reading the words, looking for clues.

I last read Catcher in the Rye in the early sixties, early on in college.  I was so naïve in those days whole concepts were explained to me.  “Stoned,” for instance, on the release of one of Bob Dylan’s songs.  Holden Caulfield’s ideas are straightforwardly complex; I know I didn’t need any code words explained.  I read the book, probably wrote a required composition on adolescent issues, probably concluding Holden would join the adult world and be no different than the rest of us. 

Remembering only a kid who was affluent enough to live on his own in New York City for two days, I started in again.  I ploughed two thirds through before I could begin to engage with the book.  An alert here; Holden had a brother who died at a young age, and I also have a brother who died too young.  Holden’s Allie died of leukemia around eleven years of age, I believe.  My brother Melvin took his own life at age twenty nine.  The book began having parallels for me.

Holden was troubled about Allie almost from the beginning, and as his state of mind became more obvious, I thought about my brother troubled over his beautiful daughter becoming deaf at six months.  One of Holden’s escapes was alcohol, my brother’s was street drugs.  Probably a drug added to marijuana, PCP, triggered my brother’s paranoia and mania.

When Holden walked from the bar, too drunk to be functioning, asking Allie to get him across the streets and down the blocks, the book finally engaged me as a treatise on mental illness.  I remembered my brother’s despair at the treatment of bi-polar disorder in the 1970’s.  The drugs that made him “sane” kept him asleep day and night.  Without them he could be violent.  And, he was a big man, over six feet, broad shoulders, curly blond hair, cornflower blue eyes that twinkled, an impish smile.

 

Mel sat at my kitchen table one day that spring of 1976.  We were drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about his illness.  “I’ll never be Melvin again, will I?” he asked.   I knew he wouldn’t, but, of course, I lied.  I figured he’d be someone, and Mel trying to be Mel was OK with me

.

It didn’t work out any way.  He closed his garage door, started the car, put all his music on and laid back and listened to the end. 

I was grateful Holden’s planned withdrawal from the world would be as a deaf mute, a plan so unworkable I had to smile at teen age angst.  And that Holden felt enough responsibility for Phoebe not to draw her into his eight dollar plan of running away.  We still end with Holden sitting in the California sanitarium finishing out J.D. Salinger’s cliff hanger:  will he go over the edge or not?  All these years later, I don’t know.  I’ll be interested in my grandson’s take on this one.