The farm on Daysville Road

 In May we sold our summer home in Lakeside, Ohio, after owning it for 34 years. Part of the sale contract was we would stay until Labor Day, so we did get to enjoy one last summer. That's just a little longer than we owned our home on Abington Road where we raised our family. We bought it in 1988 and I still was suffering from a bad case of "empty nest." I remember how much fun it was to decorate it--we were starting from scratch because everything needed to be refreshed, remodeled, or replaced. In May 1989 Bob and his friend Ron changed the paint color from white to mauve, which it remained through summer 2022, our last year.  Some knick knacks and mementos made the trip from Columbus to Lake Erie, although I didn't want it to look like our home in Columbus.  I shopped in Sandusky for things like sheets and towels, and I believe the wall paper (all the rage then) in cream, mauve, rose and blue, came from a Columbus store. 

One of my own paintings seem to fit the theme of the master bedroom--sort of rural and folksy with maple furniture from the 1940s, so it made the trip to the summer home and stayed for 34 years.  This is an acrylic painting I'd done around 1978 from a photo I'd taken in around 1974 of the field of soybeans and neighboring farm at my mother's family farm near Franklin Grove.  I believe at the time I was told that was the --------- place, and it may have even been a distant relative, but I've forgotten the name. If I had the Lee County History book, I could perhaps look it up.  

I doubt that I painted the buildings accurately because it was the sky, particularly the clouds, that caught my eye that hot day. The sun was high in the sky and the fluffy clouds created a shadow on the fields.  The farm land in that part of Lee County is very flat, so when you're outside, you have a feeling that it's all sky--maybe like Montana which is called "big sky." A story that was told to me, I think by my father, is that this area was all marsh in the 1800s when the white settlers arrived. It was near Inlet Swamp.  I'd heard from my grandmother that her father had tiled the land to drain the water. He got the land very cheap, maybe $1.00 an acre because it was swampy and wet--considered worthless for farming.  If I could see what's west of that farm on Daysville Road in the painting I think it would be Old Mill Road and Franklin Creek Park.  

 So this painting hung in the Lakeside house for 34 years, and is now in the bathroom off my office.