By Michael Ryan
CORNWALLVILLE - Nobody I know seems to like death very much but I sometimes wonder if being a ghost might actually be fun.
Maybe I shouldn’t walk in the dark because that’s when those kinds of thoughts most often come to mind.
Like a month or two back, stumbling around in the woods after midnight, happening upon a snow owl and getting into a staring match with it.
Then, under a full moon a night or so ago, I happened upon two of them. I heard the flapping of heavy wings above me, shone the flashlight in the trees and saw one flying.
It only went a few feet before settling into nearby branches. Both of the hooters looked at me curiously, the same way I was looking at them.
I talked to them a couple of minutes before realizing I may have interrupted their - ahem - and moved on, my path easily visible in the moonlight.
But strange stuff happens in sunlight too. There are a couple of chipmunks that hear me walking in the house in the morning, popping their heads up through holes in my porch deck.
I spread sunflower seeds and they fight over them, rolling like tumbleweeds on the hard wooden boards before scrambling back for the free victuals.
What’s going on in their brains, that they would engage in serious battle and then scurry over to me, a giant predator, to eat out of my hand?
And there are two geese down at the lake where I swim that were mercilessly honking at me the first day I arrived, this spring.
Yelling at them to hush up did nothing but when I went back the next day, I talked to them as I got close to the water and now they simply paddle off, resting contentedly on the grassy shore while I get in my laps.
Will the honkers miss me if I don’t show up anymore because I’ve become a ghost? Will the snow owls swivel their weird heads to see if I’m strolling down the moonlit woods trail toward their treetop?
Or might they sense me on some different level? That notion occurred to me, wandering under the full moon beneath the Big Dipper.
Earlier in the day, mowing my back yard, I circled an ancient F.E. Myers & Brothers hand pump that in the past provided water next to a barn that is gone except for the laid stone foundation.
Doing online research, I found that F.E. Myers was a trusted and leading manufacturer of water pumps and hay tools, according to the Farm Collector website.
Founded by Francis and Philip Myers in the late 1800’s, the company was based in Ashland, Ohio, where the Reliable Match Company and T.W. Miller’s Faultless Rubber Company were also headquartered.
The Myers brothers grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Ashland, a few hayfields away from the car-making Studebaker clan. Small world.
“Every farm family needed water, and F.E. Myers saw an opportunity to build pumps to meet that need,” the Farm Collector article states.
“Change, though, was in the wind,” the article states. “In post-World War II years, rural electrification eliminated the need for home water pumps,” sounding eerily similar to us humans living and dying.
The hand pump in my yard was once an everyday part of life but now might break if the rusted handle is moved, weathered and essentially forgotten.
At first, thinking that felt sad, but then it was okay and not merely okay but truly fine and dandy, knowing that an unexpected beauty of death is that memories we have of people and things are no longer just of this Earth.
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