Mount Emblem Cemetery

Posted on March 2, 2021 by admin

A cemetery with most of its memorials flush to the ground — a mid-century notion that hopefully has faded — looks like a snow-covered field in winter. That can be nice, but it doesn’t say cemetery, and the added beauty of stones in the snow, rather than under it, is missing.

There were stones in the snow at the Elk Grove Cemetery in January 2010.

Mount Emblem Cemetery in Elmhurst, Illinois, has all the ingredients to be a striking cemetery except standing stones. So on Saturday, I saw mainly this kind of scene.

With a few reminders that loved ones are memorized somewhere under there.

There are a few structures that won’t be denied their place in the pale winter sun.

Mount Emblem has, however, one thing unique in any cemetery I’ve been to, or know about: a Dutch-style windmill.

It’s the Fischer Windmill, built in the mid-19th century, long before the cemetery was established.

“The windmill was built sometime between 1849 and 1865 by Henry Fischer, after he inherited part of the family farm from his father, Frederick L. Fischer, one of the original settlers in the county,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1995. “It took two hired millwrights about three years to build it, including six months to fashion the main cogwheel.

“The main framework of the windmill is cypress, and it rests on a stone foundation. It features hand-hewn shafts and gearing of white oak and hickory… The mill ground wheat and corn for local farmers until the demand declined after the turn of the century.”

The cemetery association bought it in 1925 and, according to the Trib, installed chimes. I didn’t hear any chimes, but I did notice two loudspeakers mounted on the structure.

Cricket Creek Forest Preserve

Posted on March 1, 2021 by admin

Saturday wasn’t exactly warm, but it was above freezing, sunny and mostly windless, which had been true for some days before that. So we figured forest preserve paths might be clear of ice at least. We were mostly right, but not completely.

That’s at the north entrance of Cricket Creek Forest Preserve in Addison, which generally follows Salt Creek as it meanders through DuPage County. The Salt Creek Trail runs through the 208-acre forest preserve.

The map depicts only the northern section of Cricket Creek. Further south are two more ponds, including one reserved for model boat sailing.

“The land was prairie until the late 1930s, when it started to transform into agricultural fields dotted with homes,” the DuPage County FPD says. “The Forest Preserve District acquired the first 40 acres in 1974 and made subsequent purchases through 2016, eventually transforming a flood-prone housing development into a beautiful forest preserve.”

The trails are crushed limestone.

The photos don’t really show it, but underfoot on the path was a crushed limestone slush, making for occasionally sicky mud. Better than ice, I’d say.

We made it most of the way around the pond, until we came to patches of unmelted snow and ice.

So we turned around and went to the other side of the pond, essentially doing a U-shape partly around the pond. Not the most idyllic walk, but walking ought to be an all-season activity, including winter — mild winter days, that is.

(Very) Local Snow Scenes

Posted on February 17, 2021 by admin

After shoveling snow yesterday, I went around outside the house and took pictures. It looks like you’d expect.

Out the back, looking southwest and then south.

Nothing we haven’t seen before, but still impressive.

Our driveway.

The plume of snow over our neighbor’s fence is the result of him using his snow blower on his backyard patio. I partially dug out my car, in case I had to go somewhere during the day. I didn’t, so it remains mostly covered.

The view down the driveway to the street, looking north.

Like ours, almost all of the other driveways on the block are still covered a half-inch or so of snow. But yesterday afternoon I spotted one near neighbor using a leaf blower to try to clear that last coat of snow. Whatever, buddy.

Front yard, looking west. Life goes on. It isn’t fully visible in the picture, but the person in blue down the street was walking her dog.

The ridge of snow is next to the driveway. Considerable effort has gone into building it, including our shoveling and then snowfall. It comes up to about my mid-chest.

Now what we need is a string of sunny days just above freezing to slowly wear down the piles. A long string. Not a few really warm days in March marked by rain.

Torches Light the Western Sky

Posted on February 3, 2021 by admin

Gorgeous sunset today, this early February day in northern Illinois. Much more so for my eyes than a mere photograph indicates. More brilliant pink was mixed in than in this unadjusted shot, for instance.
But I can play with the photographic image, something I can’t do with my eyes. This strikes me as a bit closer to what I saw.
I didn’t see this, but monochrome does bring out some textures.
Luckily I didn’t see it this way, as if a nuclear device has gone off in the distance.
So eyes are the thing. That’s (one) reason to continue to send people into space. No matter how good the mechanical images are — and some are astonishing — that isn’t the same as human eyes beholding a sight.

Thursday Kibble & Bits

Posted on January 28, 2021 by admin

Sunny day, but not much meltage. Bitter cold night ahead, and another half-foot of snow forecast for the weekend. Before that, we’ll get Thai takeout at Ann’s request on Friday, and a birthday pie, to make staying at home more pleasant.

Earlier this month, when we were in Naperville, we came across a small park: Central Park. Among other things, there’s a weatherworn obelisk to memorialize local soldiers from the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. It looked like new wars had been chiseled in as time passed.

Not far from that was a Civil War cannon, looking pretty new, because it was refurbished in this century.
It’s a Confederate cannon.
A prize of war, in other words, formerly shot off by the people of Naperville for “Independence Day, parades and other civic activities” in a less safety-conscious (-obsessed?) time. That’s what we could use a little more of in our time, though I suppose in some places edgy folks might mistake it for hostile gunfire, and maybe they’d be right to.

Willard Scott Jr. was this fellow, no relation to the weatherman, it seems. Among other things, this Willard Scott marched through Georgia, doing his bit to invent modern total war.

Shucks. No evidence of life in the clouds of Venus.

Google “Venus floating platform” and one of the first hits is about the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) at the Northrop Grumman web site. My estimation of that company just went up a notch. It’s at least thinking about flying a plane over Venus.

“The Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) air vehicle is an aeroshell-less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions to a semi-buoyant, maneuverable, solar-powered air vehicle for flight in Venus’ atmosphere,” NG says. “VAMP AV will be transported to Venus by a carrier/orbiter spacecraft… It is then released and enters the atmosphere, floating down toward the planet almost like a falling leaf.

“During the flight phase, the AV flies in the Venus upper- and mid-cloud layers and collects science data for transmission to Earth. VAMP AV will be capable of orbiting the planet for a long duration — up to a year.”

Of course, the company is no stranger to space, having built the Lunar Module and Pioneer 10, just to name two marquee projects. These days its marquee project is the James Webb Space Telescope, which can’t get into space fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Recently I’ve been getting press releases that say these sorts of things:

X will teach you how to:
Reframe your life experiences as growth opportunities
Rewire your mind-set and embrace spirituality as a lifestyle
Connect to your higher self and integrate healthy lifestyle practices
Tap into universal energy and transmute pain into power
Manifest your new reality and claim your authenticity
Change the world!

***
For your upcoming stories on female disruptors, please consider Y, Founder of Z, helping visionaries reconnect to SOUL, and Live FREE to become their most successful, influential and positively impactful versions. Y teaches women to embody the energy of money and become a vibrational match so it flows consistently and predictably.

Hm. My name seems to be drifting onto all sorts of lists, at some distance from commercial real estate. Though I do like that phrase, “energy of money,” and the idea of it flowing “consistently and predictably” certainly has appeal.

Bemis Woods

Posted on January 25, 2021 by admin

This is the funniest thing I saw over the weekend.
A recycling container belonging to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. As soon as I saw it, I had the urge to peek inside. You’d expect three separate spaces, right? No. Everything goes into the same large space.

We were at Bemis Woods, a forest preserve in Westchester, Illinois, a western suburb just to the east of the DuPage County line and I-294.
We walked from the parking lot to the green trail, then the red trail, then the purple trail, then on the road back to the parking lot. About a mile and a half in all. The trails were a little treacherous.
The snow cover was thin, and where previous walkers had been, some of the snow had been scuffed enough to re-freeze as ice. Some parts of the trail were well covered with slippery zones, others less so.

Evidence of many other walkers, people and dogs, was easy to spot.
Still, it was a good walk through the woods at just below freezing.

We crossed Salt Creek twice. Once at a footbridge. The view from there.
Once along Wolf Road.
A good walk, but summer’s better on the whole. As it is for most things. The last time I was near Bemis — a little to the west, that time — was in August more than two years ago.

Poplar Creek, Winter ’21

Posted on January 24, 2021 by admin

So far winter hasn’t been all that harsh. No blizzards, no subzero stretches. We’ve gotten snow a few inches at a time, which has thinned out during days just above freezing. Still, I suspect an Arctic blast is coming soon. Probably after the heavy snow due tomorrow night.

In the meantime, temps around freezing mean we can take walks in forest preserves. Not long ago we took the dog out to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve (formally the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve). It’s close by here in the northwest suburbs, but we hadn’t been in a good while.

Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake.
Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.

Downtown Naperville

Posted on January 21, 2021 by admin

Naperville counts as an edge city, in as much as I understand the term. At about 148,000 people, it could stand alone as a small city — third largest in Illinois, as it happens — and it has a mixed economy: the usual large employers such as the local schools and a hospital, but also Nokia, BP, BMO Harris and North Central College.

For a suburb, Naperville has a remarkably robust downtown core, including retail, office space, and public buildings. After we walked near the river on Saturday, we wandered over to Naperville’s downtown, which isn’t far from the riverwalk.

One reason that downtown has been able to grow, I’ve read, is that long ago the village made sure that the area has a lot of free parking. Want people to drive to your relatively dense town, stop and spend money? Provide free parking. Is that sustainable? I don’t know. Maybe it won’t really be until we all drive electric cars. But for now that brings people in, and encourages them to linger. No worries about feeding the meter.

So simple, so hard for towns who see parking as a revenue stream to understand. I’ll bet whatever revenue Naperville would have gotten from parking fees is vastly outpaced by property tax and sales tax revenue generated by its robust downtown.

Of course, it probably isn’t that simple. Except I have a hunch that it is.

Robust, but not everything’s good, as you’d expect. These are hard times.
There was (to me) a surprising amount of public art downtown, the legacy of a recent public art initiative. For instance, there’s an alley off S. Main St., “Rubin’s Way,” that sports long, twin murals.
One seems to depict idealized modern Naperville.
The other an idealized past Naperville.
“The mural is part of the nonprofit Naperville Century Walk public art initiative and depicts a crowd watching a parade go by. One of the artists, Diosdado ‘Dodie’ Mondero, told the Naperville Sun in 2012 the work is ‘Normal Rockwell-inspired,’ ” the Chicago Tribune reports. Yep.

“At the time of its installation [beginning in 2011], businesses paid $1,000 or more to have their business name on a sign included in the mural, the Sun story said. The cost was $1,000 for a full adult figure, $600 for an adult head and $3,000 for families or groups to be in the scene.”

There’s a petition, with nearly 50,000 signatures now, to add more people of color to the modern wing of the mural.

Not far away, also off Main St., is a mural honoring the Masons, including George Washington and Joseph Naper (1798–1862), founder of Naperville.
Seems Naper was a mason, too. And much else besides — a real 19th-century CV, to quote Wiki: “early Illinois pioneer, ship captain, shipbuilder, businessman, surveyor, state militia officer, soldier, politician, and city planner.”

“Chartered October 2, 1849, Euclid Lodge No. 65 A. F. & A. M. has had a presence throughout downtown Naperville for 170 years, noted Paul Felstrup for the Freemasons during the recent celebration that began with a re-dedication of the Century Walk Masonic Mural ‘Faith, Hope & Charity,’ ” says a site called Pos!tively Naperville.

“Back in 2011, the mural was designed and painted by Naperville artist Marianne Lisson-Kuhn. Formerly gracing the wall at Main and Jefferson outside of Russell’s Dry Cleaners, the mural was relocated to the exterior wall near the intersection of Main Street at Jackson Avenue.”

Also on Main St.
A plaque next it says in part:

HEARTLAND HARVEST 1997

Honoring the soybean, oat, wheat, corn and butterfly-filled landscapes that once dominated the area, this Italian glass tile mosaic pays homage to the historic contributions of Naperville’s family farms…

A block to the east on S. Washington St. is an unusual plaque. Developers don’t get much memorializing, but there is one to Norman Rubin (1929-2010).
It’s at the entrance to a building called Washington Place, a small retail development of Rubin’s that currently includes Athleta, Banana Republic and Ulta as tenants. Just one of a number of local developments for him, since he was instrumental in making downtown Naperville what it is. Him and free parking.

Naperville Riverwalk, Winter ’21

Posted on January 19, 2021 by admin

The DuPage River snakes through downtown Naperville, Illinois. The last time we were there, the sun shined bright on the leafy greenery along its riverwalk.

On Saturday, the look was a little different. We took a walk along it.Plenty of trees along the way, including this enormous oak. Ash. Not sure, that gnarled bark could be either, according to my untrained eye. Usually the presence of oak leaves and acorns would confirm that one way or the other, but those tree scatterings are covered by snow these days.
In the hollow of the tree —
— peanuts? Yes. Maybe a squirrel squirreled them away. Or maybe whimsical placement by a human.

Near the riverwalk I spotted a couple of plaques-on-rocks. This one has the look of passing a number of winters (and summers) out in the elements.
DuPage County Sesquicentennial

1839-1989

This recognition has been a joint effort of the DuPage County Sesquicentennial Celebration Inc., the city of Naperville, and the Naperville Heritage Society in honor of DuPage, the voyageur, for whom the county was named. DuPage operated the first recorded trading post at the forks of the DuPage River in Naperville, which eventually became the first county seat.

DuPage might have actually been Pierre Page, but he certainly was a trader in the area and had an establishment in the future DuPage County. Wheaton has been the county seat for a long time, since 1867.

A newer-looking plaque. As it should be, since it’s less than a year old. This is its first winter out in the elements.
I’m not going to transcribe all that, but it honors one Chuck Papanos, a long-time Naperville Park District employee associated with the riverwalk. “Chuck’s hard work helped make the riverwalk a place of beauty for everyone to enjoy,” it says in part.

Attaboy, Chuck. We did enjoy the riverwalk, even on a chilly January day.

Spring Valley Winter ’21

Posted on January 6, 2021 by admin

I don’t know Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), but I believe he had the spot-on quote for the day, which I heard on the radio this afternoon: “This is banana republic crap.”

Five months ago, the full flush of summer marked Spring Valley. Two days into the new year, the place was markedly brown and gray and white.We had a pretty good walk anyway, especially since the paths were mostly clear of ice patches.
Snow and ice fell during the last days of December, and on New Year’s Day itself, but it was above freezing the next day, enough to melt some of the ice. Not much ice on the creek either, but I wouldn’t want to fall in.
The unpaved trails offered the crunch of snow underfoot, a sound I like.
The peony field.

The snow was wet enough to cling to most of the trees.It sifts from Leaden Sieves —
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road —

(Emily Dickinson)

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Suburban Chicago