A love letter to my inner-city neighborhood

I love my inner-city Akron neighborhood.

Surrounded by beautiful homes and friendly residents, we are less than five minutes away from EJ Thomas to enjoy Akron Symphony concerts, the downtown Akron-Summit County Library to hear award-winning authors speak, the Akron Art Museum for spectacular exhibits and talks, and The Nightlight Cinema to see movies not shown elsewhere.

Each year when spring arrives, I all but abandon the interior of my home. I set up outdoor furniture for months of open-air living and plant garden beds and pots with flowers, vegetables and herbs. Impromptu visits with neighbors—all but impossible during months burrowed inside warm homes—resume. On the first temperate day last April, my next-door neighbor Joe and I stood in my driveway and lingered in inconsequential conversation while our combined six dogs frolicked. None of us wanted to leave the warm sun and moist spring breeze.

Summer in my neighborhood, stocked with century-old homes, is a huge part of why I love where I live. Built in the days before air conditioning, most of the houses have invitingly large front porches. Like me, many of my neighbors drink their morning coffee and, later in the day, eat dinner on porches set up like living and dining rooms.

My favorite season, however, has long been fall, when the temperatures and humidity drop, the blue of the sky deepens and life somehow feels easier (the kids returning to school helps).

Soon after they appear at Acme, pumpkins and multi-colored gourds cascade down the steps of my porches. Then, on the third Thursday of September, I drive to Barberton to buy half a dozen or more potted chrysanthemums from the Barberton Mum Festival. Priced at five for $40, the festival sells large mums in a wide variety of colors, all robustly healthy.

There’s work a-plenty to be done outside this time of year. Flowerpots need hauled into the garage to shelter from the coming winter. The leaves from several 80-foot oak trees repeatedly obscure my lawn and its regular supply of dog bombs. The satisfaction that comes after hours of hauling leaves to the curb is both simple and substantial.

Years ago, the owner of Constantine’s Garden Center in Bath, not far from where my two dyslexic sons saw their tutor for many years, told me the sales of spring flower bulbs have dropped dramatically, perhaps as much as 75%, from what it was in the 1960s and ’70s.

There have been years when bulbs I bought never made it into the ground. I was afraid the same would happen this year when October seemed interested in only serving dreary, cold rain on the weekends. And then, on November 1, autumn appeared to have clocked out early, and we awoke to over 2 inches of snow on the ground. My impatiens, coleus, dahlias and many (though not all) zinnias crumpled and turned brown. And that’s the poignant lesson of fall. Throughout October, I enjoy each warm sunny day and the kaleidoscope of color blooming in my yards even more than I had all summer because I know full well it will soon be gone.

But as often happens, the death freeze was quickly followed by gossamer summer. Last weekend, the first nice one in a month, I planted dozens of bulbs, this year attended by my new assistant, Henry. A Yorkipoo puppy we brought home last winter, Henry is what some call a “Velcro dog” because he never wants to be parted from his humans, especially me. Nine pounds of keen intelligence and outsized personality, Henry rules the house. He wrestles with our 90-pound German shepherd with a pugnacious ferocity, but then sweetly allows my 11-year-old daughter to carry him around like a baby.

As I dug 6-inch holes for tulips, hyacinths and daffodils, Henry and I visited with neighbors who walked to the stores at the end of my street. Diversity has always been one of Akron’s strengths, and I take pride in my own slice of the city, which is both ethnically and economically diverse.

Or, as my 20-something sons tell me, my neighborhood “slaps.”

Thirty years ago while visiting my grandmother in Tucson, she and I struck up conversation with a man who was visiting from Seattle. When I mentioned that Seattle had recently become a popular place to relocate, he told me, “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.”

When I bought my 1909 Akron Arts and Crafts house 21 years ago, like the man from Seattle, I believed I’d gotten in on one of the best-kept livable city secrets. There are many reasons to believe in Akron’s potential, which I don’t hesitate to write about.

Now, more than ever, I believe in this city and its citizens and am committed to our success.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, November 10, 2023.