This summer the black-eyed Susans which flourish in a large corner of our front yard were the first to go. Fenced in by a curving row of landscape bricks, these splendid blooms silently proclaim the lazy days of the season with a brilliant display of buttery golden petals surrounding the dark brown and black centers.
Alas, this year, however, these glorious heralds of warmth were soon done in by an excess of heat and a shortage of rain. By the first week of September, smudges of brown stained the petals which encircled the dark center. It was as if the blooms now seemed to be wearing an eye patch.
Their season was done.
It is not difficult to remove them. A hard yank or a couple of tugs loosens each lifeless stalk from the ground but it’s the bending, the stooping, and the wrenching that seems to wear on the body before they get dropped into the big blue yard waste bin from Homewood Disposal. That exertion may be the price we must pay when we need to uproot the attractive things of life.
In summer, when we invite friends to our shack on Shabbona and when they ask us how to get there we say, “It’s the house with all the yellow flowers in the front yard.” Now without those brilliant beacons our home is still visible because we now can say ‘It’s the house with a couple of eight-foot plus sunflowers by the front door.”
Our front yard garden is an ever changing experiment each year. It is where we plant in spring or fall and wait to see what comes up. And those humongous sunflowers are the result of a test planting of two-year old seeds.
Who knew?
Pay Money, Take Choice
Park Forest’s 75th anniversary concert will take place at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 in Freedom Hall with Terisa Griffin on stage and with audience members able to select how much they want to spend.
The concert itself is $40. For $75 you get a pre-concert reception at 5:30 p.m. along with the performance. If you bite the $125 bullet, you get the concert and the dinner.
Concert proceeds will benefit the Park Forest Veterans Closet and Resource Center, which assists veterans returning from service, as well as the Park Forest Historical Society. Funds also will help cover expenses for youth programming, including the annual summer camp offered through the village’s Recreation and Parks Department.
Got someplace to go that evening? You can send a check to Park Forest community relations manager Evelyn Randle at Village Hall documenting any or all of the groups that you wish to benefit.
Bob Merrifield
The call came early last Friday. It was from Bob’s wife Pat who tearfully told me Bob died the night before.
I think Bob Merrifield had three great loves; his wife Pat, the truth, and his Great Lakes sailboat which he named the “Omega” because he once told me “It is the last boat I’ll ever have.”
For some 35 years, from 1967 to 2002, Bob perfected his brilliant editing and writing skills; first for the Detroit Bureau of the Associated Press, then for the Detroit News and for nearly a quarter of a century for the Chicago Tribune.
He was a superb reporter. Bob not only knew where the proverbial bodies were buried, he knew why. Once, as the Chicago Tribune’s Joliet bureau chief, he had the distinction of getting two front page co-bylines for his coverage of the Plainfield tornado in 1990.
My last five years at the paper (1992-1997) were spent in the small Joliet office, working side-by-side with him. It was the start of a friendship that lasted more than 30 years and included Thursday afternoon sessions at the bar on Chicago Street whenever both of us were in town.
This Thursday I will drive to Joliet one more time. I will toast his memory and the good times we shared once again.
I may not return.
There is no longer a reason.
jerryshnay@gmail.com
