Point of View: Nirvana on East Front Street
I told our eldest daughter that she was living in northwestern Ohio the Suburban Dream, which she knows.
It’s quiet, it’s safe, her two athletic sons are moving every moment, and the houses — the ones in Perrysburg’s historic district, anyway — remind you of Sag Harbor’s architecture, frozen in time, pleasing to the eye.
Modern-day America, the malls, the tract housing, is not far away, but far enough so that you’re really not aware of it as you sit on her porch on East Front Street, across from which is an estate that was given by Mrs. Stranahan to the municipality for everyone to enjoy.
Its horticulturalist said she’d be glad to come over to tell Emily the names of her trees. I mean, you’ve got to know the names of your trees. The estate leads down to a winding river, the Maumee, near Fort Meigs, where the Americans twice withstood sieges by the British and their Indian confederates during the War of 1812 (so things were noisy once, though most of the residents had by then decamped).
Her in-laws too live right by the river, about four miles distant, the house set off by itself, its front porch and turret on the second floor facing it. There’s always a breeze. A hammock’s off to the right under a cottonwood tree. There’s a garden and an old red garage. Mary calls it paradise.
Perrysburg is named after Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie. You’ll remember it was he whose flag said, “Don’t give up the ship,” and who, following the naval victory, wrote General William Henry Harrison, “We have met the enemy and they are ours,” which has since, of course, been transmuted into “We have met the enemy and they are us.”
They call Perrysburg a city, but population-wise it’s no bigger than East Hampton, which is a town — for most of the year at any rate. Our editor thinks the figure here may rise now to as much as 100,000 on summer weekends, qualifying it as a city, I suppose, and pushing the excitement meter reading here to the max. I told Emily I was sorry there were no celebrities to fawn after out there — adding that that fact undoubtedly was reflected in their lower standard of living — though she said she was quite happy where she was, and I think she meant it.