Ohio Ghosts

They tumble deceptively onto the fissured asphalt, plaster cracked years flake away where no eye watches. Hollow houses, their boards rotted by the chew and gnaw of tireless winds, old-time burgs, small, forgotten, lost now within a retreating landscape. We used to thrive in a hard-scabble way. We used to be owners of faithful dogs, the daughters of grit-hardened men, sons of backwoods riflemen, blood kin to the furnace and the fields. Both factory and Mill printed a community upon long dusty summers, winter launched many a lunch-pail march, and it was good in a nail-bitten way. It all fell away so swiftly, a bottom line in a thick read ledger scratched through. Thereafter great-grandparents were buried in tall clocks, all carted away upon jumbled flatbeds. Piece by piece our town was sold for pennies - our very own, well-worn, spent out pennies.