pamkirst2014 posted: " I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years. Mac Nelson, Twenty West ***************************************** This time, we stopped to visit James A. Garfield's home" Catching My Drift
I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years.
Mac Nelson, Twenty West
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This time, we stopped to visit James A. Garfield's home.
Garfield was president of the United States for a brief time in 1880. He never intended to run; he never wanted to run. There was a clog, a bottleneck, among the party candidates who DID want to be president, there was a dusty kerfuffle, and somehow, when the dust settled, Garfield (who had served as a respected representative from Ohio for almost twenty years, I think) found his name on the ballot.
So, being a true public servant, he ran.
He and his brilliant wife, Lucretia, had seven children; five of them lived to adulthood. Those same five lived in the White House for a little while.
Only one of the children was a girl; she was called Mollie. The boys slept in kind of a dorm in the Garfield home, except for the baby. Mollie was the only one to have her own room.
There were a LOT of rooms in Garfield's farmhouse; many of them were added after his death, when a family friend did a kind of pre-GoFundMe appeal, and collected money to sustain Lucretia and the children for many years. It was equivalent, our docent Pat tells us, to eight million buckaroos in 2023 cash.
Pat is a wiry little whippet of a woman; she has a thinning tumble of curly white hair, watery blue eyes behind wire-rims—over which she peers at us,—and a dowager's hump. She was, she tells us, a high school teacher for many years, and she warns us not to touch ANYthing once we enter the Garfield home.
"The only thing you CAN touch," she says, sharply; she peers at each of us as she speaks, "is the FLOOR. With your FEET."
Jim tenses next to me, gives me the "Holy shit!" look, but, the fear of God having been instilled, we have a good tour. (Even though I get called out for putting my hand on the doorway woodwork when we look into the baby's room.) Pat is knowledgeable and funny, and we learn a great deal about the house and its occupants and their stories.
In the museum part of the Garfield historical site, a site owned by the National Parks, we learn that Garfield kept Lucretia hanging for five long years before they finally got married. ("A rough start," Pat comments, "but a wonderful marriage once they got past a few beginning glitches.") And we learn that Garfield, just into his presidency, was shot by a disgruntled civil servant who'd lost his job.
The wounds, though, should not have killed James A. Garfield. His doctors did that, instead; they refused to believe any of the new 'antisepsis' theories other medicos were promoting. No, Garfield's doctors did not so much as wash their hands before tending to the president. Sometimes they had been in contact with lovely things—other sick people, of course; manure from the horse's stall; tall glasses of unpasteurized milk, maybe— and they carried those germs into their explorations of the bullet holes in Garfield's trunk.
He died of infection, just barely become a President. And the rest of the Garfields went home to Mentor, Ohio, and to the house we toured.
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We have been passing by "James A. Garfield Historic Site" road signs for years, on our way to and from western New York. And one of us would idly say, "Someday, we need to stop and go see that!"
Ten years of doing that, and yesterday, we stopped to visit. It was a lovely breezy, summer day,—about 77 degrees, with moist, cool winds blowing off Lake Erie,—and we enjoyed finally touring the Garfield home. Garfield campaigned from his capacious front porch. Reporters tented on his broad lawns (the home was called 'Lawnfield' for a long time afterward). Lucretia had a windmill erected to pump water, and she harnessed a natural gas well on the property to fuel gas lamps and stoves and gas inserts in all the fireplaces.
After Garfield died, said Pat, Lucretia installed her younger brother Joe as farm manager. Lucretia tried to run things herself, but none of the workers would listen to a woman. So Joe and his wife came to live at Lawnfield. Lucretia told Joe what to do; Joe commanded the workers. Everything ran smoothly as soft-serve ice cream on a hot summer's day.
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We toured with eight other people. Some were from Ohio; there was a couple from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, and two more people were from Hawaii.
Pat kept her eagle eyes on us all; we all behaved and we all enjoyed the tour.
After years of talking about visiting someday, Someday had arrived.
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Really, there isn't enough to say about touring Garfield's home to write a post about, but I just finished reading You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (Maggie Smith the poet—and you can read her poem "Good Roots" here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones. It launched her into fame and also provided the title for the memoir I just finished.). You Could Make This Place Beautiful is written in vignettes.
This bothered me at first; because, Hi; I am Pam, and I am straight-forward narrative dependent. I put the book aside for a couple of days and indulged in some fluffy summer reading instead. But You Could Make This Place Beautiful had launched tendrils in the first twenty pages, and those tendrils kept pulling me back. Finally, I gave the book a second chance, and, after I read through the first fifty pages, patterns were emerging. A brilliant writer, Maggie Smith wove those vignettes together like a tapestry, pieced them like a quilt. Once the method was established, I could see how they linked, swooped, arc-ed backward and forward, told Smith's story in maybe a more wonderful way than a straight-forward narrative could have done.
It was a book I was sad to see end. And it got me thinking about vignettes.
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Google Dictionary says a vignette is "…a brief evocative description, account, or episode."
Definition 2 surprised me, though. A vignette can also be "…a small illustration or photograph which fades into its background without a border."
I go on etymonline.com to find the history of the word, too, thinking the ving part must have been related to something about vision or a way of seeing. But no: I am surprised to learn that the root of the word 'vignette,' in Old French, is vigne, which meant vineyard. So adding the -ette makes it a small one—a little vineyard.
By 1751, vignette meant not only a little spread of grapevines, but also a border design around book pages, a design with vines and tendrils. THAT was a vignette, too: a viney book page border.
And then that meaning jumped to those little portraits Google Dictionary talks about. In the mid-1880's, apparently, a small photograph with, etymonline.com says, "blurred edges," because "very popular"…and those came to be known as vignettes. Little portrayals in illustrations then jumped to being little portrayals in WORDS. By 1880, 'vignette' had been applied to prose, meaning a "literary sketch."
Or: "...a brief evocative description, account, or episode."
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"Lawnfield" is on Route 20, in Mentor, Ohio. Mark pointed out to Jim that we COULD, if we chose, just take Route 20 all the way to Chautauqua County.
Jim looked very interested.
"Should we?" he asked.
But, "Nah," said Mark. "It'd take us too long.
We agreed, though, that it would be fun to do someday, when time was not an issue, when we had no place waiting for us to check in, no events and visits lined up: just get on Route 20 and travel where we willed.
We could start where Route 20 (which became a US highway in 1920) starts, in Boston, Mass, and travel all the way across the country, to Newport, Oregon. That would be a meander of 3,365 miles.
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Dr. Mac Nelson was the kind of young professor who took his 1970's English classes out onto the grass in front of Fenton Hall, each of us lugging our weighty Riverside Shakespeare, and then declaimed, from memory, whole bits of plays—The Merchant of Venice,Hamlet, MacBeth, complete chunks of the historical dramas. The young co-eds in his classes (I was one) sighed and gloried in his oratory.
Later, as a more seasoned English prof in the early 2000's, Dr. Nelson wrote a book called Twenty West: The Great Road Across America. The book (the Amazon overview tells me) and its author meander along Route 20, sometimes behind a wheel, sometimes in a canoe, and Nelson stops to explore large and small attractions all the way from one coast to another.
Dr. Nelson is gone now, and I have never read his book.
I look it up and order a copy.
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After touring the Garfield site, we get back on Route 90. We pass through Ohio intro Pennsylvania, and we begin seeing vineyards. NOT little vineyards, though…these are sprawling acres that look like bolts of corduroy spread across the landscape. There are cornfields, too, but we are leaving soybeans behind. As we near New York State, we see more and more signs for wineries. The vineyards start to outnumber the cornfields. And, before the toll road begins in New York State, we exit Route 90 for Route 20.
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As we enter New York State, we often have vineyards bordering both sides of Route 20. We start to recognize the names of vineyards. When I was rising into seventh and eighth grades, I picked grapes on fall weekends. A friend's family owned a vineyard,—much too big to be a vignette—and the grapes were all picked by hand,—by, mostly, the hands of preteens and teens and a skeleton crew of people we probably didn't realize then were migrant workers.
We got special clippers; we wore gloves; we dropped lustrous bunches of deep purple grapes (lots of Concords in that Welch-y area back then) into big yellow crates. We got paid by the crate. Some people filled those yellow crates FAST.
I was not good at this, let me just say. My fingers got cold and cramped. My friends would be working on filling crate #2 and I would be struggling along with my first one. The cute boys who picked up our full crates at the end of each row would eye me pityingly.
"Slow…" they would say, ominously.
It was fun to be outside in the apple-cheek fall weather, to watch the antics of other faster pickers, who would throw grapes at and flirt with each other. But I was always discouraged. Some of my friends would make twenty dollars in a weekend.
I think I once brought home six. Babysitting was a more lucrative way for me to earn a little spending money.
Around the time I was in eighth grade, the first grape-picking machines showed up in the county. They were gawky contraptions that could have sprung from the mind of a Star Wars set designer. The driver sat atop long-legged hardware that rolled along the rows knocking off the grapes. (Seeing these things roll down the highway toward the next farm was kind of like seeing a pterodactyl fly by; they were remarkable and somehow, despite being fairly new inventions, archaic, linked to the earth in a primal way.)
No more grape-picking jobs then, which was, for me, just as well.
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"When we come back in September," says Mark, as we roll into Chautauqua County, "this whole area will smell like grapes."
We pass the old Welch's building in Westfield, New York. Some people referred to those who worked there as 'Welchkins.'
The big brick building, Mark says, has been sold, and its owners plan to create shops on the first floor and loft-style condos up above.
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Mark's grandpa, whom he called 'Pa,' was a master gardener. Pa truly had a vignette—a small vineyard, which included a bower under which he kept a napping chaise. Mostly what Mark remembers about that 'vignette' is that small children who interrupted their grandfather's nap were not greeted with smiles.
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Actually, we lived in a vignette once, when we sold our house in Maysville and rented an old farmhouse in Fredonia for a year, while we searched for a home to buy. I got to see the grapes in all their stages, from sweet green budding to bunches of dusky purple grapes hanging heavy, waiting to be plucked.
A dirt road separated one side of the little vineyard from the other. Our neighbor, Shirley, was a wildlife whisperer. She would gather old cereal into a sack and walk down through to where the vines ended, just before the woods began. She would broadcast that cereal, and animals—-deer, raccoons, groundhogs— would come running to greet her and eat those offerings.
One time Shirley was walking down that path and a groundhog was so anxious to see her, it began running toward her. And it got running so hard, it couldn't stop, and it barreled into her shins.
She showed us those splendid groundhog bruises, blue and purple and red, the color of grape stages in the vineyard where she fed her wild friends.
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That house, by the way, was on Route Twenty.
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We drove on Route Twenty toward Buffalo today, to meet dear friends at a Hamburg, New York, restaurant for breakfast. Along the way we saw signs for some sort of grape artisan craft festival, although I may have that wording a little jumbled up. Because I am feeling a little jumbled, back in the land of sprawling vineyards and small ones; in a town where Route Twenty beckons you to travel in both directions; in a place where, as Mark says, just taking a ride can connect us to memories.
Those memories come back to me in vignettes—in vignettes in at least two senses of the word.
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