Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)

incredibly dingy and drab and I could not envisage the town I used to love. It was like the shell of a house after a disastrous fire. And indeed my life there is completely burnt out.
A thin crescent moon hung low in the S.W. sky. We walked down McKinley Ave. (now mosaicly [sic] E. State St.) – I noted here and there houses I used to know “There” someone pointed out is the house Jack Astry remodeled (Astry was one of my H. S. classmates) – Contrary to the usual experience which is that all places and distances are much smaller than we remember them, M, S, Hawkins house seemed incredibly large –
A glympse [sic] of the McKinley Avenue School, and the Old Ladies Homes – both unchanged – Out Woodland Ave to Maple, thence to Franklin – my mother’s birthplace covered with asbestos shingles – hideous.
A few tiny striped acorns from the same pin-oak, from which I used to gather them – what a warm feeling I got from that –
After supper all of us to Arbaugh’s – Clyde Dole and his wife Emma Trotter; Lucy Calin (dowdy and unkempt as ever, with a long black coat that reached to her ankles) and her tall son Bob.
B & I slept in Jimmy’s room – outside the foggy smoky gloom cut by the dim glow here and there of inadequate street lights – depressing –
Dec. 2 – Thurs.
Walk before breakfast – out Maple, to beyond Centennial lane. The same feeling of unreality, of a dream – Everything practically unchanged – no new houses, the sidewalks all as of old.
But a new kind of grass had appeared in recent years.