Once upon a time on Randall Road in northern Illinois, there
were farms. Many farms. Many farms with fields touching, boundaried
by oak trees and creeks. In one field,
black and white cows strolled, dropping their faces to nudge the green grass. In another field, children climbed trees, ran
through a forest of wild mustard and white flowers.
In the nearby town, known for many decades as “the city of
churches”, the river hills included a synagogue and Mason’s Hall. In the downtown, two major department stores,
locally owned banks and restaurants, two theaters, a YMCA and YWCA, and a
public library formed the safe circles of friendship for the town’s adults and
younger members.
For those growing up in the town, summer morning music or
academic programs at the junior high and high school were followed by afternoons
of swimming at a public park pool. At
the same park in the evenings, twice a week, music concerts beckoned families
and romancing couples to lie on blankets and study the stars or gather
fireflies in glass jars. Also on summer
nights, before air-conditioning would entice them to watch television inside,
families ended the evenings with a visit to Dairy Queen or A&W, momentarily
freezing their memories. Winters brought
dark days and storms with weekends of ice skating by the white pavilion in the
second public park, hot cocoa and marsh mellows served by Methodist ladies in
woolen coats and mufflers. On particular occasions, the white pavilion, its
stained glass windows gleaming like colored silk, welcomed little girls who
pointed their toes on the wooden floor and swirled in pink and blue tutus made
of netting.
While the farms flourished, so did the town. But in the rooms of commerce, engineers
planned and later built a widened Randall Road that tore down the farmhouses,
barns, and silos and buried the lives of the farmers and their families. The children grew, partied, kissed and some
lost their innocence in the back seat of their parents’ cars. Others maintained an intricate balance of
studiousness and shyness through adolescence to high school graduation.
Upon graduation, the children’s
waters parted. The built road became a
commercial corridor dotted with chain stores, soulless centers of
merchandise. Perhaps as a
counterbalance, windowless mega churches arose with concrete parking lots and
thin borders of bushes.
Time passes....
Fifty years later, a few of
those children--now carrying stories of retirement, grandchildren, and spouses’
deaths gather in a backyard that was once a farm field. Here the ghosts of the Fox and Sauk Tribes
linger with the ghosts of white settlers and farmers. Now, the ghosts rise up in the late afternoon
shadows and touch the shoulders of the grown children. A windmill in the yard twirls in the breeze
as a recognition of time turns down the smiles of those who were once entwined
like leaves of morning glory vines.
