Sometimes forest preserves include more prairie than forest here in the Prairie State, but not so for the Aurora West Forest Preserve in Kane County.
Forest means forest, once you walk a short way along a wide path.
Supposedly it’s a path for unleashed dogs, but we didn’t have our dog, and we didn’t see anyone else’s either. Or anyone else at all.
A good place to imagine you’re far from the works of man.
Mostly.
Tucked away north of Higgins Road but south of I-90 (the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway) in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, is Greve Cemetery. It’s about a half a mile to the west of Fabbrini Park as the crow flies, which I guess would be a fitting bird to seek out an obscure burying ground.
For a suburban development, the streets of the surrounding neighborhood of Barrington Square are fairly dense, with houses and townhouses of various configurations lining the way. A lot of people were out and about on those streets and yards late in the afternoon when I parked on Abbey Wood Drive to look for the cemetery, but no one else was interested in it.
It wasn’t hard to find.
Greve Cemetery
In 1827 was called “Wild Cat Grove”
Johann Gerhard Greve settled here from
Hanover, Germany, in 1838
Purchased land from government in 1842
Property was first used as a family and
Community cemetery in the 1840s
Sold to Cook County in 1899
Acquired by the village of Hoffman Estates in 1989
Ah, those plucky German settlers. The cemetery is atop a small hill — pretty much the only kind in Illinois — and thick with oaks and other tall trees.
Fenced in completely. I assume because of a history of wanker vandals beginning with the surrounding development in the late 20th century.
Still, most of the stones are visible. Including the Greves.
And the Völkenings, complete with umlaut.
Stones without much left to tell their tales.
A short history of the cemetery is here, and another article about it is here.
Occasionally I wake up in the wee hours and have trouble falling asleep again, which I figure must be true for a lot of people. That happened this morning at around 4. One strategy to deal with that is to put a very familiar album on the CD player/tape deck on the night table. Familiar and not too loud. I listen to the first song or two and then realize I’m listening to the last, or one of the later songs on the album, having slept through the rest.
That didn’t work this morning, so I just waited for sleep to return as the morning light began to creep into the room. Then I remembered I needed to put gas in my motorcycle, so I put the nozzle in the right place, and sat down at a small cafe table under an umbrella for a cold drink, trusting the pump to shut off automatically. Mm. I’ve never owned a motorcycle, I thought. Ah, I’m dreaming.
Later in the morning, when I was fully awake, I was in the back yard for a few minutes, enjoying a pleasant breeze.
I’m fairly sure that’s an aspen in my back yard, just on my side of the fence. I’ve seen it grow quite tall over the years. It will be one of the first to turn color for the fall — a few leaves are already yellow, I see.
I’ve read that they’re sometimes called quaking aspens. Or trembling aspens. The names certainly fit today.
Ontarioville, Illinois, is the geographic equivalent of a ghost sign on the side of a building. Its history is detailed by Neil Gale of the Digital Research Library of the Illinois History Journal. Enough to note here that it was a 19th-century town, but it didn’t prosper in the 20th century for various reasons, not enough to remain a distinct entity. Now Ontarioville is the name of a neighborhood in northwest suburban Hanover Park.
One bit of residuum from the town is the Old Ontarioville Cemetery, located on an unattended slice of land between the driveway to a water reclamation facility and the parking lot of the Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
It only has a scattering of stones, mostly obscured by grass in August and illegible anyway.
Some have almost completely worn away.
But not the Schick stone.
Or the Harmening stone.
Fred Schick (d. 1933) owned a general store in the community in the early 1900s and was postmaster besides, so it seems likely that Schick Road, a thoroughfare not far to the south, was named for him. He rests in the weedy cemetery with his wife Sophia, who lived to 1952, and his son, who died at 17 in 1920.
Heinrich Harmening (d. 1903), here with wife Dorothea (d. 1924), seems like a somewhat bigger fish in this small pond, apparently owning a prosperous dairy farm and building a large house on what is now U.S. 20 (as pictured in Gale’s article). I must have driven by it many times without noticing, so one fine day I might go looking for it, if it’s still around.
Tucked between an equipment rental shop and a truck accessories store on Irving Park Road in northwest suburban Roselle is Trinity Lutheran Cemetery. It’s also known as Freinenigreit Cemetery, according to a number of sources, including Find-A-Grave, but not any signs at the cemetery itself (that I noticed).
The alternate name speaks to the German heritage of this part of the Chicago suburbs, and the names of some of the earlier permanent residents reflect that as well: Botterman, Engel, Freitag, Geistfeld, Habermeier, Hattendorf, Reuter and Schmidt.
It’s a small slice of a cemetery, about 300 burials, many of which are recent. Those names tend to be more varied: Abraham, Burkinshaw, Dunbar, Ek, Hernandez, Pastori, Smakal and Tumminaro.
A nice design for a simple stone.
For an infant, born and died in 2004.
This one caught my attention.
I looked up Jake. A bright lad, just a little younger than my oldest child, who died suddenly of an undetected heart condition.
During our Saturday walk at Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, we wandered into the Illinois Heritage Grove, which is section of the sanctuary devoted to native woody plants. A mini-arboretum.
The last time I spent any time there was in the fall, when things looked a bit different: 
Summer. Roughly the same view of part of the oval path through the grove.
For now, the grove’s bushes and trees are garbed in greenery. Such as the American plum (Prunus americana).
The hackberry (Celtis occidentalis).
The elderberry (Sambucus canadensis).
Remember, your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
On August 1 we visited Spring Valley again, about two months after our most recent visit. The place is flush with a different selection of flowers and other flora than in June.
Glad to see that cornflowers are still blooming there. I think of it as a July flower.
I take this to be a kind of lily, but not sure the details.
A Google reverse image search suggests peony for this, but I doubt it. Still, a nice little cluster.
A larger cluster. Valerian?
Looks similar, but a different color.
Hard to believe it won’t be long before Spring Valley will look like this.
Warm and dry lately. Very warm sometimes. Luckily, our deck has an umbrella for shade.
Spring on Jupiter or Mars? Never mind, here’s summer on Saturn. At least in its northern hemisphere. Seasons are long there are probably don’t involve relaxing moments on back yard decks. Anyway, a thing of great beauty.
“This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project,” the NASA text says. “OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers continue tracking shifting weather patterns and storms.”
For contrast, an older observation of Saturn. Another thing of beauty.
Plate X from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings 1881-1882, these days posted at Wikimedia.
Closer to home, at Schaumburg Town Square.
The sculpture is “Rubber Tipped Crane,” by Christine Rojek. Installed in 2012. Lilly said she hadn’t remembered seeing it before, but I did. Rojek also did “Ecce Hora” not far away.
Our latest Star Trek episode — we’re still watching about one a week — was “Squire of Gothos,” an early example of kidnap Kirk (and maybe Spock and others) and make him (them) outfight or outwit some adversary. This was a particularly good example of that kind of plot, including a deus ex machina ending that actually worked pretty well.
Our latest movie: The Shining. I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I remember it drew in some crowds in the summer of ’80, because when we got to the theater, only front-row seats were available. So I got to experience the Overlook Hotel in all its surreal, horror-infused glory as an enormous wall of light towering over me.
Always good to watch Jack Nicholson do what he does, in this case descend into homicidal madness. I also thought Shelley Duvall’s parallel track — her increasing freaked-out-ness, you might say — was on target. Her character has been mocked as whiny and weak, but she and her son survived.
So the movie holds up fairly well (and I don’t care at all what Stephen King thought of it). Still, not Kubrick’s best. What could possibly top Dr. Strangelove or 2001? But worth watching again after 40 years.
Another few days, another late afternoon walk around a suburban pond. The strolls might be merging into one warm green blur already. They certainly will after the passage of time.
The walk this time was at Springfield Park, which isn’t in the capital city of that name, or any other Springfield, but instead in Bloomingdale, Illinois. It’s a village park with sports facilities, a community garden and a large pond with an irregular figure-8 trail around it. We walked about a mile and a half all together, at least according to my phone. Somehow that’s often the length.
In fact, it’s pretty much sports park on one side, open-water marsh on the other. With an adequate number of benches. You can’t always count on finding those.
Lots of July wildflowers, of course.
Views from the south end of the pond.
A boardwalk.
Wouldn’t be much of a suburban marsh without a boardwalk over the flora somewhere.
On Saturday, we had high heat and wall-of-water thick humidity. I woke to a bit of thunder on Sunday morning, followed mostly by drizzle. By Sunday afternoon, sunny conditions were back, but not so much heat. Or humidity. Chamber of commerce weather, as an old colleague of mine used to call it.
Today was a little hot for ideal c-of-c weather, but I like it. Cicadas have returned in the late afternoons, followed by just a hint of crickets after dark. We still have fireflies.
One late afternoon last week we went to Gray Farm Park & Conservation Area, which is 47 acres tucked away off any main street here in the northwest suburbs. Even though it has a large water feature, I expect it’s mostly unknown except to nearby residents.
I know about it because I troll maps. The only kind of trolling I do. We entered the park from Cloverdale Lane, and then walked as far as the elementary school.
Much of the park is an open field, though some is a long pond edged by metal bracing.
The conservation area — which is mostly large open-water cattail marsh — is behind tall grass this time of year.
Though if you look carefully enough, you can find a path through the tall grass just behind the nearby elementary school. The path leads to a boardwalk.
The boardwalk dead ends before long, but it does offer a view of the much larger pond — the cattail marsh. A grassy view, but a view all the same.
I’ve read that Gray Farm is a good place for bird watching. But my impulse to watch birds doesn’t go much beyond, hey, that’s an interesting-looking bird. What’s it called? I don’t know either. Never mind.
