Scout Moves

Pardon me while I dust off this place that has been collecting cobwebs strung from the chipped plaster and rotting woodwork.  I had intended to write in December and to talk about my orchestra's delightful Christmas concert. I was going to write about a performance by the Canton Symphony, too, and about going to Atlanta to see my family for the holiday. I did none of that, obviously. Well, then I was going to write about how Husband, the girls and I flew to Jamaica the day after Christmas for a five-day rest-up at the Grand Palladium Lady Hamilton Resort and Spa, complete with pictures and restaurant reviews, but I didn't do any of that either. But I'll tell you this much—while the trip to Jamaica was overall a success, I came home with a souvenir I wouldn't give you ten cents for. As I mentioned, we stayed at a resort, an all-inclusive kind of place with a massive pool, a lovely beach, a spa and lots of restaurants. We stayed on the property for all but one day wh...

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 ...

In all of the packing for the Big Move, I ran across these treasures on the top shelf of an often-neglected kitchen cabinet. This was the kind of cabinet where you shove sippy cups and find them 23 years after your children have graduated to cups without lids and miscellaneous water bottles from tennis events with the logos of local businesses printed on the side. When we were expecting No. 1, living as people with not much money in New Jersey surrounded by people who had plenty of extra to spend, a friend hosted a baby shower for me. It was a surprise, and I was seven or eight months along, I remember because I had finally finished vomiting, and people were relieved to be able to acknowledge the good parts of expecting babies. I got things I would need, like a stroller, a carrier, onesies and diapers, and then I got not just one but two sets of Peter Rabbit dishes, identical sets. I would have never spent my own money on such a thing at the time, but I was grateful for the luxu...

It's Moving Day Part 1 today, with the movers taking out almost all of our furniture. They'll be back Monday for Part 2. As they haul out the heavy stuff that makes them groan and complain a bit ("That dresser weighs 400 pounds!"), I'll just sit here and watch CNN because they told me all they need from me today is moral support. That translates as, "Stay out of the way." We have spent the last couple of months sorting through three stories of belongings and putting things into the categories of Keep, Give Away and Trash, and I have been amazed at what we've been storing that, when it comes down to it, is basically trash. Are we hoarders? And I have made so many trips to Good Will with car loads of donations that I feel like I know the guy at the door with the donation bin. In all of the sorting, I came upon the dresser I have had since I was a teenager, and I had to categorize it. A part of me said to keep it because I have had it for so long (i...

Early this morning, I took Big Puppy outside for a morning run around. Packers would be arriving soon to box up the breakables ahead of tomorrow's big move, and Baxter would be spending the day with the border. I thought he might want to bounce around in the grass before being shut up in a cage for hours. We have had some heavy fog the last several mornings, and this morning we were socked in, so dense I couldn't see beyond the road at the bottom of my little hill. Beyond that road is a field and a creek, and beyond that is a major highway, and beyond that is the town edged by a railroad. None of that could I see through the fog this morning, but I knew it was there. Whole towns don't just disappear over night, now, do they? Baxter did his business and tracked deer scents and searched for his toy for me to throw, and I marveled at how quiet were my immediate surroundings. At that hour, between school bus runs, there seemed to be not a sound but the dog's panting,...

I mentioned we're moving, right? We have spent the past several weeks driving around Canton and surrounding towns and townships (I'm never quite sure where I am when I get very far from the highway), and we finally narrowed in on a place to call home. We made an offer, and the sellers accepted, and now we wait. There will be inspections and papers and a closing followed by a bathroom remodel, and it will all take weeks to be complete. And then we'll have a new place we'll call "home." I was thinking about that term last night as we were having dinner in Canton. We left the restaurant for the 30-minute drive to Home, but in a couple of months, it will take us just 12 minutes to get from that same restaurant to Home. We'll pull into that now strange driveway and open the garage door, and we'll be Home. We'll let the dog out to pee on his new Home turf, and we'll settle in with a cup of coffee from our new Home kitchen and plunk down on the couc...

I've gone quiet here on my corner of Blogville. Turned the lights out, shut the curtains and turned out the cat, literally. The newspapers have begun to pile up on the front porch, and the weeds are as high as an elephant's eye. But I'm thinking about cleaning the place up and moving back in. In a previous post, I mentioned my family had endured some crises. We had a death in the family ( my brother-in-law ) that had Husband spending time between Florida and Illinois taking care of his mother and of her house that needed to be sold. And we had an illness in the family that had me moving to a suburb of Cleveland for a couple of months to act as caregiver. These two things happened simultaneously so we each had to deal with our designated situations on our own. I remember during that first week up north, when the in-laws were having a memorial service for my brother-in-law in Illinois. I had just begun staying in Beachwood, Ohio and couldn't attend. It was live-stream...

A couple of days ago, I heard about a young woman who was considering suicide and had made some specific plans to carry it out later in the evening, but then she decided to hang on to just one good thing for at least that day. In her case, that one good thing was Disney movies. The innocence and nostalgia were the elixir she needed. I’m not considering suicide, but I’ve got an elixir of my own to draw on in hard times (or easy, for that matter), and in my case, it’s playing with an orchestra. We performed last night, and the experience was good medicine. In Small Town, there is a quiet kind of guy named Bob who, with his wife, teaches piano lessons in a private studio. Eustacia took lessons from him for a couple of years when she was much younger, in fact. Bob also composes piano music, which has become beloved with students and teachers around the world. I said he was quiet—he’s also humble and unassuming, and unless someone else takes on the role of trumpet tooter on his behalf, ...

Apropos of nothing, the song “What Do You Do with A Drunken Sailor” keeps popping into my head. Well, it’s not completely from nowhere—my orchestra will be performing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #2 in a few weeks, and my part for the first movement has “Drunken Sailor” notated above one set of rests. If you listen closely, you can hear a hint of the tune in the music. The question I’m really asking isn’t about drunken sailors, though. It’s about sick cats. What do you do with a sick cat? You put him down. Is that harsh? Yes, it is, but these days, I see no way around such really difficult situations but to approach them harshly, or maybe just frankly. You do what must be done even if you’d rather pass the cup to someone else. My family has endured a series of very unfortunate events as of late, and just when I thought I had reached my load-bearing limit, I woke up Saturday morning to a sick cat. Tiger was our beloved orange tabby who we have had in our house for 13 years. He on...

Does absence really make the heart grow fonder? Well, as far as it relates to me and my blog, not so much. I almost forgot I had this spot in Blogville, and honestly, Blogville has gone from being a thriving community to a being a ghost town, as far as I can tell. It’s my own fault, really. I’m a neglectful neighbor. Today, though, I remembered I decided to use this blog as a personal journal to look back on. And today I would like to honor my departed brother-in-law, Phil. He didn’t wake up yesterday. Died in his sleep of natural causes. Phil had a history of heart problems and was a brittle diabetic, so he might have died from a number of things. My in-laws have been scattered across the States for as long as I have known them. In fact, when Husband and I first started dating, his parents weren’t even living in the States. They were spending six months (or maybe a year?) living in Singapore, and I met them after we had become engaged. Husband’s three sisters attended our we...

This is my mother’s sweater, or should I say WAS my mother’s sweater. We stole it. A couple of years ago, when my sisters and I helped our mother move out of her house and into my sister Karen’s house, we had mountains of clothes to sort through. Mama had a three-bedroom house, and she had clothes in every single closet, including the double cedar-lined one in the basement; and she was moving into a bedroom with one closet. There was definite wardrobe thinning to do. My mother is one of those Depression-Era people who never got rid of a single thing that passed through her grip. If something came into her possession, it remained in her possession, for decades. That goes for old frying pans that had lost their handles, chipped cereal bowls from a 1970s gas station promotion, old shoes from her years working in an office when every dress had matching pumps and then all of those dresses. She made a lot of her clothes back in the day, and as a fairly good seamstress, her dresses w...

There are just so many books to read! I’m not thinking in terms of the phrase “so many books and so little time.” I’ve got all the time in the world because I’m not in a race to read books as quickly as possible. I’m content to take them one at a time without a deadline. I’m thinking in terms of which one will be the next one with full recognition this is a First World dilemma. I’ve got a To-Read shelf in Good Reads, and I’ve got a wish list at Amazon, and there are even other books I’ve heard about but haven’t digitally documented. When I finish reading one book, I look at this shelf and this list and these random titles and debate which to choose, and it seems having these handy tools to help sort through my many choices does not make the choosing any easier. I’m reading on my iPad mini through a Kindle ap, and as much as I love paper books, the ap is undeniably handy, and it allows me to keep a “stack” of books all in one place. Just by looking at the archive screen, I’ve re...

I haven’t written here in my online journal for a couple of weeks because I haven’t had much to say. I don’t keep a paper journal, but if I did, my guess is I wouldn’t crack the spine on it for weeks at a time as well. I’ve begun to look at this blog as a journal, a place to keep a record of life as it happens, and sometimes life happens more slowly than at other times. Last night, life happened at break-neck speed, and I have something to say about it. The Tuscarawas Philharmonic performed what we called Celtic Cavalcade. The official definition of “cavalcade” is “a procession of vehicles or ships” or “a dramatic sequence or procession.” For this concert, we’ll go with the procession, and we’ll even call it dramatic. For a few weeks, we’ve been referring to this event as a circus because we included so many guests—a fiddler, a mandolin player, a hammered dulcimer virtuoso, a tenor to break your heart, a pipe and drum band and a team of Irish dancers. Oh, and a full orchestra. We...

Just last week, I got a note from someone asking how it is I don’t completely implode from the vitriol and ignorance and hatefulness that gets spewed on Facebook—she assumes I don’t implode—and I told her that I block those posts, or those posters, from my newsfeed. There is more to a person than politics, so by putting a wall between their offensive views and my sensitive disposition, I can still like the person for their other qualities without seeing them with warts and fangs. Besides, sometimes someone can have a differing opinion that isn’t based on ignorance. It’s just different. But still, I know what she means. There are people who are just unpleasant and negative and arrogant, and they assume everyone else wants to know about their politics because they, of course, are right and point straight to the truth. Those people I don’t mind seeing as is, warts and all. Otherwise—I’ve noticed lately that some of my friends “like” a post about requiring welfare recipients to be drug...

I have such an appreciation for Inauguration Day. We Americans like to fight, we lean toward violence, we entertain all kinds of opinions in the public square, we make a mess of things and then pick ourselves up and move on. But on this day, we manage to come together and swear in a president. True, he has to ride in a bullet-proof car and stand behind bullet-proof glass in case some jack-ass tries to shoot him, but we get through it. Today happens to fall on Martin Luther King Day as well (along with my father's birthday—he would have been 93), so we mark two great days at once. Just in case MLK doesn't get fair coverage today, I am resurrecting my newspaper column from a few years ago. I think it's generally bad form to quote one's self, but I'm willing to commit bad form in order to make my point one more time. Here goes: Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. My deceased father’s birthday is this week, as well, and on some years, it coincides with the day comm...