Remarkable Markers 2

What if I were to tell you that, when no one is looking, invisible spirits spin a large globe made of solid rock in a cemetery? Well, that is one of the explanations for the restless sphere in Marion Cemetery!

Author Eleanor Y. Stewart and the Sphere of the Spirits

In Marion, Ohio

Yes, the granite ball honoring the family of Charles Merchant in Marion, Ohio slowly spins in an erratic pattern on its base without ever becoming scratched. Others have attempted to explain the movements of the globe; see especially http://www.graveaddiction.com/marion.html. The conclusion that spirits are at work appeals to my Irish DNA.

On an Authors’ Day Out not long after Halloween some years ago, writer (and my dear friend) Eleanor Y. Stewart and I visited the cemetery after a day of research on the topics of Huber and Leader, manufacturers of agricultural steam engines in Marion. We had toured the Marion County Historical Society’s Heritage Hall Museum with its Wyandot Popcorn Museum featuring lovely popcorn wagons and its main exhibits including Prince Imperial, a long-maned horse stuffed by the same taxidermist that stuffed Jumbo the Elephant for P. T. Barnum. A wonderful hot lunch on a cold day had been our pleasure at the Warehouse, a depot specializing in Italian fare. Eleanor and I could hardly wait to see the famous ball! It exceeded our expectations.

The late afternoon had grown so overcast and cold that Eleanor and I were the only visitors to the section of the cemetery where the Merchants’ Ball stands (and revolves). Although we were alone, we felt as if someone were watching us. Occasionally, we glanced over our shoulders to survey the stones surrounding us in the gathering gloom. Were we sensing, uhm, entities?

In her poem entitled “The Graves of the Flowers,” Hoosier poet Louisa Chitwood (1832–1855) wrote, “Upon no stone is carved the name / Of April’s children fair; / They perished when the sky was bright, / And gentle was the air. / To the soft kisses of the breeze / They held half trembling up / Full many a small transparent urn / And honey-ladened cup.” When she was only 23, Louisa died; Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass in the same year. Perhaps Louisa would have taken her place in the new poetry, had she lived; after all, she left a cache of a thousand poems when she died.

As the November dusk began tilting into night, Eleanor and I shivered, scurried to my car, and drove away from the cemetery with its urns and cups and invisible hands reaching toward a cold globe.

Halloween

In the 1950s, when I was a child, relatively few facets of life were commercialized. Take Halloween, for example. Almost no parents in my hometown bought costumes for their children. Masks may have been purchased at a dime store, but parents helped their children to build their own costumes around the store-bought masks. Hoboes might wear jeans with holes at the knees and carry poles with bandanas of belongings tied at the ends. Cowboys might wear hats and holsters. In my family, wrapping in a plain white sheet was considered costume enough, even if the mask had nothing to do with the sheet.

Carving Jack-o'-Lanterns on Halloween in the 1950s

One Halloween, my mother was shopping in Lafayette when I noticed a plastic mask resembling a collie’s head. The plastic’s outer surface felt fuzzy to the touch. I politely asked my mother if I could have the mask for Halloween. What joy! She consented! That year, as I skipped along the sidewalks of Pine Village, I wore my white sheet and my dog mask with tremendous pride.

We kids designed our own trick-or-treat bags from the brown paper bags that came from the grocery stores, such as the IGAs in Attica or Oxford, Smitty’s in West Lafayette, Marsh’s in Lafayette, or the A&P in Lafayette. Jack-o'-lanterns in orange and black crayons were favorite motifs, as were witches, black cats, owls, skulls, ghosts, and moons.

My classmate Alan introduced me to a noisemaker. He cut notches in the edge of a wood spool, which rotated on the end of a stick. When he pulled a string wrapped around the spool, the notched edge made a startling noise against a window pane. Of course, I had to make one immediately!

My parents preferred that my brother and I visit the homes of relatives and family friends, rather than asking for candy at the doors of people less well known. Even with such restrictions, we came away with bags containing more than enough candy! Three Musketeers bars were my favorite, but there were treats more exciting than commercially available candies.

My grandmother and my great aunt made popcorn balls that were out-of-this-world delicious! They were enormous, to boot! It seemed you were eating a popcorn ball almost as large as your head! Years later, I tried making popcorn balls. They were not nearly as good. In the process, I came to wonder how my great aunt and grandmother avoided burning the tips of their fingers, for I surely did! As far as I can tell, there is no way to form popcorn balls without coming into contact with the hot syrup. Could my ancestors have worn gloves? I doubt that they did. At any rate, the homemade popcorn balls far outdistanced the candy bars in flavor.

I recall the delightful strangeness of trick-or-treating. In the darkness, it was difficult to see where the roots of the old trees had tilted the squares of concrete in the sidewalk leading to my grandmother’s house, and I would invariably trip on them. Clouds raced across the moon, sometimes hiding it altogether. In front of my great aunt’s house were bushes that thrashed about in the cold wind. I felt there could be ghouls lurking behind them. One year, Elwyn Gray’s barn had burned not long before Halloween. The structure still stood, but there were large gaps among the blackened boards. The eerie shell stood across the street from my grandmother’s house. I was ill at ease from the scent of burned wood and the moonlight flickering between the cracks in the sides as I hurried past.

Eleanor Y. Stewart and I included many of my Halloween memories in the opening chapter of our middle grade novel Maggie Quick. Those Halloweens that I experienced in a less commercialized era are now enshrined in a book that has earned top reviews!        

Rustic Prints 3

With this rustic print, we delve deeply into Halloween—or I think we do. The orange sunset and the ghoulish shadows give an immediate impression of the ghostly season. The shocks of corn lean to the right as if they might be capable of motion; if so, they are marching forward to cross the stream and to haunt the two lonely farmhouses in the valley.

Framed Print of Shocks of Corn in a Scene Reminiscent of Halloween

I am not old enough to remember corn planted in checked rows so that a field could be cultivated at right angles without uprooting the young stalks, but I do recall cornstalks that were farther apart in the row and rows that were relatively far apart. When I was young, the corn stood in the field later in the season before it was harvested, and it was not arranged in shocks. I have a distinct recollection of coming home from college for Thanksgiving and finding my father still picking corn. From my vantage point in time, the shocks in this rural print date back a long way. The corn appears to have been planted amid the trees of the hill. I am thinking that the location of the shocks provides evidence of a crop that demanded a great deal of hands-on labor. No big tractor danced around those trees to plant the corn in such a narrow field along a hill above a creek! Accordingly, the scene takes us back a few generations.

The faux wood grain of the paper matting contrasts oddly with the real wood grain of the frame, but the generation when the art was produced may have had an aesthetic that permitted appreciation of the faux and the real side-by-side. To my eye, the dark mat lends mystery to the illustration.

As in the previous print in this series of blogs, the trees have retained their leaves: a fact suggesting that they are oaks. Hints of low-lying fog imply the possibility of frost in the morning to come.

Unlike the previous two prints in these blogs, no congenial smoke curls from a chimney. The artist has avoided any indication of conviviality or familial warmth.

From the oaks, through the marching skeletons of corn, to the dismal gray clouds approaching in the last light of the setting sun, the illustration expresses the Celtic Samhain transplanted in American soil. Am I reading too much into the art, or did the artist deliberately provide for such impressions?