Scout Moves

In an effort to get to know our new town as thoroughly as possible, Baxter and I paid a visit to Price Park today. It's a nice park on Maple Street with everything a park should have—a playground, a duck pond with the most aggressive ducks!, fishing, baseball, tennis, basketball, and picnic shelters. In the summer, the Canton Community Band performs there, and I have had the pleasure of playing with them a few times. But now that I live here, I can check out the entire 18 acres of Price Park. The place also has a walking path, and that was the main purpose of our visit today. It's one mile long and was created in honor of Earl. L. Stockert, a local man who was an avid hiker, according to his obituary, and thus the marker at the beginning of the trail, "dedicated to his footprints through time": When we arrived at the park, I looked for a no-pets sign among all the other signs about park hours and how you shouldn't swim in the duck pond, and no skateboarding...

As I mentioned, it's craft day here. It's been craft day for a few days in a row, actually, and all that craftiness has yielded three shadow boxes displaying pages from old text books. Among the old books on my shelves, I realized I had a nice collection of family books—my mother's fourth-grade math book and her science book from some year after that, and my grandmother's fifth-grade English book. My grandmother was married in 1920, so backtrack from there; and my mother was in the fourth grade in 1935. I started by laying out the raw materials—shadow boxes from JoAnns craft store, some tiny paperclips  and glue dots from the same store and the loose pages cut from the books: Beginning with the math book, I came up with a way to present the pages, folded loosely and glued at the end, and I laid them out on the board from the frame. It took several tries and lots of reorganizing, but I finally got what I wanted. I added some fun things—I chose some photos from the...

It's craft time at Scout's house, and I'm taking part old school books. I have my mother's fourth-grade math book and her science book from an elementary year—these would have been used in the 1930s—and I have my grandmother's English book from her fifth grade—it's copyrighted 1906, and it looks like this: The pages of all of these books are cracking, and the spines and covers are wearing thin, so I have decided to take them apart and reassemble them into shadow boxes. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm using as inspiration a vague memory of a large shadow box I saw at a home decor store back in the spring. This massive thing was filled with crumbled sheets of old books, or maybe they were folded or maybe they were rolled. Either way, they made an interesting display. I'll show you the results a little bit later, but for now, let's talk about the kinds of things kids learned in English class at the beginning of the 1900s. My grandmothe...

Today, Baxter and I explored The Schneider Park Loop, my new go-to dog walking destination. A few days before we moved to North Canton, I was walking the dog at Small Town Park, where we had been going nearly every day, and I wondered where we would walk in the new town on the days I didn't feel like tracing the neighborhood on its sidewalks. The old park didn't have a trail, but I had put together a route using the parking lot, sidewalks and the road that lead to the pool. Well, Schneider Community Park is it, and it has an actual trail. This park is relatively new and will be developed in stages throughout all of its 42 acres off of Schneider Street, thus the park name. At this stage, it has wild flowers, a playground, a sweet little picnic shelter area built by a Girl Scout troop, a rain garden, frisbee golf and a 4-acre dog park. The fenced-in marvel is divided into two sections, one for little dogs and one for big dogs like Baxter. Inside the fence are drinking fountains...

So, here I sit in my new house in my new town. After 25 years in Small Town, I'm not sure what to call this new place. Maybe what it is—North Canton. North Canton, which used to be New Berlin, has about 5,000 more people than Small Town, and it's adjacent to Canton, with a population of about 72,000. Combined, that's about as many people as in all of Small Town's county. So, what do you call a town like this? Medium-sized town? I'll stick with North Canton for now. I suppose I could start referring to it as Hoovertown because it seems to be built around the Hoover name. That's Hoover as in vacuum cleaner, not Hoover as in president. In the 1800s, WH Hoover had a tannery business on a farm here—actually, my new house sits on what used to be that very farm, and the original barn is the neighborhood recreation center. His son, HW Hoover, developed an "electric suction sweeper" and began marketing it, and Hoover vacuums were born. They aren't made ...