Walking old Roads

Yesterday I had a chance to drive and walk around my hometown of Leetonia, Ohio.  

My kids have not seen the town since they were too small to remember it, and I had not been there since they razed the high school and built a K-12 campus on what was in my day the old middle school complex.  We also had a chance to walk around the old farm where I lived my formative years. 

Visiting a place where one experienced adolescence is odd.   As a poet and short story writer, I am always hesitant to go back to places because I want my memories and my imagination and my romanticism to gel together into my creative writing.  Otherwise I’d be a historian or a memoirist.  So returning has a way of pushing reality to the forefront.  The romantic notions sentimentalized into summer afternoons climbing around the great mysterious barn 

are now replaced with the strong visual of a dilapidated and obsolete structure full of rusted out archaic farm equipments and disheveled piles of buckets, broken pitchforks, feedbags, and corn cobs. 

So to bring things back to fiction, here’s a poem I wrote a few months ago.  It represents that blend of romantic imagination and real ground. 

I remember JT and Fry and ’73 Chevy Novas, lift-kits, crazy maroon furry-fabric epoxied to the dash, wide-tires and chrome-rims that we greased in the winter to keep impressive on summer nights; 350s and glass-packed mufflers, headers and after-market shifters, cheap cans of convenience-store beer and Columbiana girls who no one really knew how we knew.

Her name was Janice and her father lived in a trailer and we all believed he had once slaughtered a Grizzly Bear with a sawed-off twelve-gauge he hid under the seat of his Chevy truck.

I remember the coldness of the concrete steps below the dam, the roaring water powerfully fighting through the gates, the fingernail moon, the falling stars, the shadows of our lives as we hunkered down to avoid being seen while we smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and drank red-rose wine and supposed we understood grace and serenity.

Her sister was Marie and I loved her in a way that only a sixteen year-old can love, like I loved my fingers, my blood, my eyes and she believed I was the moon, the canyon, a train-track running northwest across the floor of a deep briny sea.

I remember bonfires in mowed alfalfa fields and one perfectly formed wild apple tree, standing proudly, never pruned, always plowed around.  Uneaten wind-fallen yellow/red apples that will never earn a name wasting next to dandelion girls perched on the warm hoods of our ’73 Chevy Novas while Fry fooled with the equalizer and JT tied a purple bandana around his head and how we looked in the dark sky above like this could go on forever.