Excelsior: Near the corner of Grace and Daisy

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Near the corner of Grace and Daisy

For weeks I've by trying to figure out how this sentence ought to end: In a neat yellow cottage on Daisy Avenue there once lived a---what?

A witch? An orphan? A kindly old woman who loved to bake sweets for small children? Or, ramping up the incongruity, a serial killer, an ogress, or a Great White Shark?

A little yellow house not far from the corner of Grace and Daisy is where I'm making my home on the weekends when I'm in Jackson, Ohio, and it's just as cute as it sounds, with a magnolia tree in the front yard and a spacious front porch where we can sit and watch the world go by, although not much of the world makes its way up Daisy. Jackson is a little town (population just over 6000) that resembles many others in this part of Appalachia: from its bustling downtown, you can drive five minutes in any direction and find yourself in the middle of a cornfield.

Hints of the boom times are visible downtown, where historic markers describe the impact of salt-boiling, iron-smelting, and apple-growing on the town's economy. Next to the courthouse stands a statue of James Rhodes, a local boy who served four terms as Ohio's governor, and the vicissitudes of history are evident just down the street, where the county sheriff's office, a brutally modern concrete building, sits across the street from an empty wood frame building evoking the city's frontier days, its faded paint peeling except where a realtor has painted "$95,000" in bold red figures. A sign on the window reveals that this was once the home of Michael's Ice Cream, now located in a nicer building on Main Street. (Try the Bubble, a great excuse to scarf down ice cream and nuts toasted to perfection.)

Early Saturday morning the town is so quiet that I feel no qualms about jaywalking right in front of the police station. A few early risers are out and about: a man mowing, a woman weeding, a young woman pushing a toddler in a stroller and carrying a baby in a backpack, a tall man walking a tiny fox terrier, a petite woman being dragged behind an immense fluffy mutt. A church carillon plays "Morning Has Broken" as I walk the broad avenues, where peeling asphalt reveals the original brick streets and big friendly front porches hold Adirondack chairs or sturdy wooden rockers.

Over here a tidy white fame house looks as if it had stepped out of the frame of Grant Wood's American Gothic, gussied itself up with red shutters on the arched windows and red pillars around the porch, and then squatted down on a busy Jackson avenue. Here's an imposing yellow brick house fronted by a wide oak door surrounded by stained glass, while across the street another yellow house sits neglected, with water-stained plywood where the door ought to be and weeds colonizing the yard.

Smaller houses squeeze together on side streets, and every once in a while I make a turn and suddenly catch a glimpse of the downtown water tower just where I don't expect it to be. It's painted to resemble a rosy red apple, another nod to the town's apple-growing industry, rumored to have started with a visit from Johnny Appleseed and now sadly in decline.

I'm trying to get to know the town in the best way I know how: by walking its streets, reading its historical signs, taking pictures of its points of interest. The next step is more difficult: talking to the people, finding out what makes the mowing man, the weeding woman, the dog-walkers, the stroller-pushers, and the carillon-players love a place that struggles with the same problems haunting all of southern Ohio: unemployment, opioids, lack of outlets for young people's ambitions. Not all of these issues are visible from the front porch of the little yellow house on Daisy Avenue, so I'll have to go where the people are and ask questions.

For now, though, it's a lovely morning and I think I'll sit and enjoy the breeze, the lingering magnolia blossoms, and the banana trees and continue to ponder how my peculiar sentence will end.