Excerpted from my book of photographs:
Wabi-Sabi – Decay, Emptiness,
and Other Ephemeral Beauty.
On hot summer days in Ohio, when I was ten, the temperature and humidity both in the 80’s or 90’s (and no air conditioning), my buddies and I wound through trails overgrown with weeds higher than we were, from our residential neighborhood, carved out of farm-land and forest, out to Manchester Road Market, which fronted on the main street that ran through our one-stoplight town.
I still remember the worn-almost-smooth, rough-hewn, wide-plank, sawdust-covered wood floors of the tiny market, and the square cooler you opened and reached down into to retrieve your cola, root beer, or creme soda by sliding it along the cold metal track – for a reasonable-but-not-especially-cheap-at-the-time, nickel. (I recall it being a significant event when sodas went up to seven cents.) I feel sorry for younger people who don’t go back that far, before the shopping mall-ization of America – when things were still made out of metal and wood.
Summers were hot and winters were cold. Want to go ice-skating? First you’ve gotta sweep the snow off the pond. Sledding? Take the garden hose and wet down the snow on the hill in the woods by your buddy’s house to make it slick, then wait for it to freeze. Baseball? Clear the weeds and build a backstop out of scavenged lumber and chicken wire. Too hot for you? Run cold water on your wrists from the sink down in the basement and go back outside and play. That’s just the way it was.
More than half a century later, those paths are still there, no doubt kept open by succeeding generations of neighborhood ten-year olds…and so is Manchester Road Market – sitting there in the hot sun, in the midst of its dirt and gravel parking lot, backed up to weeds and scrub trees, the cicadas buzzing in the heat – sans sawdust, grocery, and cooler, intermittently repurposed over the years – often vacant; a shell of its former self, but still standing, looking exactly as it did in 1959.
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