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The Beautiful Changes

Allen Avenue, our old home. Photos by Sandy Robison

When I was a child, we moved from Jamestown to Ashtabula, Ohio, in 1959. After we left 25 Ivy St., life was substantially different. It was not just a new town and new house and new friends. Dad was on the road for weeks at a time. He began to be a visitor in our lives. Life was about to change forever too, but we lived there five years in a house on Allen Avenue near the harbor on Lake Erie.

I was 9, in the last two months of fourth grade when I was enrolled in Washington Elementary School, long ago torn down, on Lake Avenue. The next year we changed to a brand new school, Thomas Jefferson Elementary, just four blocks from home. Lucky for me the children were warm and friendly. I recall so many of those first Ashtabula friends — Maureen, Connie, Vicky, Elaine, Diana — and one of them was a quiet, blond Finnish girl named Marlene Lehtonen.

Marlene and I reconnected a few years back on Facebook. She had spent two decades of her working life as a Special Education teacher, and I can imagine she was the perfect mentor and champion for those children. You can sense her calm as you approach her. You can see the enormous generosity of spirit, and strength too, in those remarkable eyes. She is nonetheless a Finn — no nonsense, pragmatic, strong. Five years ago, she had a battle with breast cancer and beat it back. Now, it’s returned and spread. She has been through hell the past six months.

Recently, I drove to Ashtabula and visited with her. We see one another on Facebook every day. Yet visiting a friend so ill is a hard thing. One worries about what to say and what not to say, how much to say, how little. But the visit is the thing. And you know, if they can stand their struggle, you better be able to face it too.

My sister and I drove into Ashtabula on a mid-October day so glorious, it could have been May. But the smell of autumn was in the air with fallen leaves blowing in the breeze on every sidewalk. The beautiful was changing. The giant ash trees I remembered — many of which have been killed by a disease — were rich with color. Autumn’s colors are both beautiful and melancholy. The bright golds are made solemn by the deep brown and red leaves. The bright reds of some maples and other trees seem to shout, we’re still here. Look at us!

Paula and Sandy at Harbor Perk.

For my sister and me, Ashtabula was a beloved home and the place where it all unraveled for us. We moved into a brand new ranch style home in a development like thousands of others in 1950’s America: a quarter acre lot, three bedrooms and one bath, a front porch and back steps that overlooked fields not yet developed, still full of hay. Mother hung her laundry out back as did all the housewives of Ohio and rural, small town America, the clothes and sheets and towels snapping in the wind, dried by the air and sun. We had a swing set, set into concrete the proper way, by our two grandfathers who drove over from Jamestown and worked in tandem. There was a redwood picnic table where we ate our meals all summer long. I often found mother on a sunny afternoon, kneeling in her gardens, planting or plucking marigolds and zinnia.

Next door lived the Stottles, Dave, June and their two little girls, Carole and Marie. Carole was almost my age and Marie, Vicky’s age. June and my mother bonded for life. Later, years later, June’s marriage fell apart too. A few years after that, she remarried our widowed uncle, George Sherwin. They were married for 24 years. The beautiful changes, as poet Richard Wilbur reminds us. It changes.

Before I visited my friend Marlene, Vicky and I met Paula Plona for coffee down at the Harbor Perk. The street dips down to the actual deep water harbor where huge Great Lakes boats load and unload and go on their way lake to lake. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you see one departing or just outside the harbor, some 1000 feet long, riding low and sleek in the water. We sat outside in the sun. Paula — a retired social worker — is full of wit and sass and a profound compassion for all.

At two in the afternoon, we made our way to Marlene’s house up on Warrick Drive, the same street my pals Pookie and Allan Burns grew up on, right down the block. Now it’s all built up with beautiful homes and towering ash trees. Two matching silver Hondas identified Marlene and her companion Harlan’s garage. Their house is architecturally stunning inside and out. We found Marlene there, seated on the love seat. Beside her was a walker. Clearly the chemo had taken its toll. She was straw thin. But she was still that pretty blond Finnish girl.

I put down my Eckloff’s Bakery gifts on her kitchen counter — a box of mixed cookies and Swedish favorites like almond tarts and spritz, a loaf of sweet rye Limpa, a cardamom coffee bread.

Marlene’s third-grade class at Washington Elementary. Marlene is pictured second from the left in the second row.

We did not talk of illness though with her almost shocking pragmatism, Marlene told us she had already donated her body to science. The thought of that hung in the air. But she was full of quiet talk about the world around her, the animals she has rescued and the new dog park she sponsored. We talked too of Harbor Cat Rescue where Harlan did the plumbing there as a gift and where Marlene has put in so much effort and love. Marlene has spent her time making life better for people and animals. Had I not known her, I would recognize immediately this is a woman with great heart and passion.

I told her my old boyfriend Allan had called to wish me a happy birthday just as we drove into Ashtabula. The irony made her smile as it did me. Marlene was recently inducted into the Harbor High Alumni Hall of Fame for her good works and a lifetime of service to community. This week she is receiving a certificate of merit from the City Council for her work promoting the new dog park. Marlene’s old dog, Windzer, one she adopted when he was already a senior, paced the floor during our visit — excited at visitors. Her cats strolled in and out of the living room. The view of the backyard through the double doors was idyllic, with drifting leaves and still green grass.

I left uplifted by Marlene’s grit. We call it sisu in Finnish. It means meeting life head on, no matter what it is. It is a rejection of self-pity or complaint; it is an embrace of what is, this very moment. It is an understanding that what is beautiful, changes. Once, beautiful might have meant perfection, a trip to Diamond Head, an expensive dress. Now it is being here right now, this day. It is withstanding the odd juxtaposition between the gorgeous and the grim. That’s how the beautiful changes.

As we drove away, I realized that though Ashtabula downtown looks a bit forlorn as do so many northern towns like it, the old streets I knew in the harbor area illustrate the best of American small town life: The sweet neighborhood where I lived with its residents who have lived there 50 years or more. Humble houses, well kept, friendly folks, beautiful leaf strewn sidewalks. There is an enormous peace to it. And this is why Marlene came home. This is why Paula came home. We return to our roots. We are sustained there. We are older now. The beautiful changes.

On our way out of town, we stopped to see June. We walked around her house and stood in her backyard, looking at our home of long ago. It always calls up such feeling, mostly good. Throughout the years, I have dreamed of that little white ranch. Often, the walls crumble and I am stuck in rubble. The dream is metaphor for loss. But most of the years were good ones — spent with Pookie Burns and Maureen Hawkins and Nancy Jones, my first true boyfriend — Pookie’s brother Allan — and riding horses at Coffee Creek Farm in Austinburg.

We had a swing set, set into concrete the proper way, by our two grandfathers who drove over from Jamestown and worked in tandem. They are pictured at left setting up the set in the backyard of the Ashtabula home.

We drove back to Jamestown full of grief and joy, filled to the brim with a sense of being here now, paused in time on a glorious day between seasons, between present and past and future, where we burn bright.

The Ashtabula bridge is pictured at left.

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