COVINGTON - He walks up to the end of Prague Street and looks out at the highway. The cars and trucks headed south on Interstate 75 are at a standstill. It's been four hours now. He wonders: When will they move on?
Sometimes it takes an overturned tractor trailer full of hazardous materials to make people stop. Sometimes it takes a purple flower. Jimmy Schlitt gets tired of watching the highway and circles around his brownstone to the garden he keeps out back.
''Mint,'' he says, pulling up a weed and holding it under my nose.
As slowly as things are moving out on the highway, life in this quiet little garden just 100 yards off the roaring interstate always will move more slowly. That traffic jam will be long gone before Jimmy Schlitt's tomatoes come up.
So will I.
Coming full-circle
To think: Those people passing through on the highway probably will feel like they've spent a year in Northern Kentucky by the time wrecking crews deliver them from the depths of frustration and boredom. Me, I've been here a year and it seems like only hours.
It's that time, though. It always gets to be this time. I've come to 516 Prague St. to say goodbye, because this is where it all started. The first story I wrote for The Enquirer was about Jimmy's father, but my hope was that you'd find the garden of Ohmer Schlitt in all my columns: in the color, flavor and life I tried to give them.
Now it's time to leave, and as I head north to Chicago, it's the memory of folks like the Schlitts that I will take with me. Mr. Schlitt embodied those qualities that make Northern Kentucky special: grace, steadiness, diligence and a strong sense of place. He lived in a typical Covington neighborhood in a city cut through with narrow streets. The houses stand shoulder-to-shoulder. So do the people. There is a kind of strength in the things that abide on all those front porches. There is a kind of rootedness here that makes people harder to knock down.
Like so many others in these river towns, Mr. Schlitt lived virtually all his life in the same place. And when he died of cancer a year ago May 9, all that he raised lingered here at 516 Prague St.
In the garden: tomatoes and summer squash, sweet peas and green beans.
In the house: his children, Virginia and Jimmy.
The sweetness secret
I ask Jimmy if he's following his father's secret recipe for raising tasty tomatoes. He says he is.
What are some of the things you do that he did? I ask.
Jimmy looks at me, grinning slyly.
''You know,'' he says.
I do. Ohmer told me once, not long before he died. He didn't take all his secrets to the grave. One of them lies criss-crossed with shadows in a wheelbarrow in the garage. It's a bag of lime. Jimmy sprinkles it on the soil because his father believed it made the tomatoes sweeter.
Ohmer used to give those tomatoes to the Parish Kitchen. They were still warm from the sun when he took them in.
The garden's a little weedy this year, though the southwest corner is bright with purple irises that nod over the top of the chain-link fence like friendly neighbors. For years Ohmer maintained this gentle patch of life near the stretch of I-75 they called Death Hill. Now it's Jimmy's turn.
He has his hands full. The tiller's broken; part of the fuel line needs to be replaced. He's ordered the part from Sears.
On top of that, he had to buy a new clothes dryer. And a new furnace for some of the rental property.
Jimmy and his sister, Virginia, live on the money they receive from tenants in their father's rental property, which amounts to two houses across the street. It isn't easy. Virginia has cancer and takes 11 pills a day. Her medical bills are high - as were her late father's. She draws Social Security benefits, but there never seems to be enough.
'Go on with life'
Not until four months after his father's death could Jimmy afford a gravestone. It was a double stone, inscribed for both Ohmer and his late wife, Dorothy, who died in August 1995. She had to wait more than a year for the gravestone.
The couple are buried side-by-side beneath a sun-drenched hill at St. John's Cemetery in Fort Wright. ''I might take some lilies of the valley out there and plant them at the foot of the grave,'' Jimmy says. ''Or marigolds. He liked them for the garden because they kept away bugs.''
I ask if they are doing OK, a year after their father's death.
''Yeah,'' Jimmy says. ''I think about him all the time.''
But like their father, they don't get emotional.
''I miss him, but I know what he told me,'' Virginia says. ''He told me to go on with my life.''
A clock ticks loudly in the dim house. Outside, the bells of St. John's Church chime. It is noon in Covington.
Goodbye, I tell the Schlitts. It's been good to know you. I'm going north now, to write for the Chicago Tribune in a city as foreign as Beirut to this Kentucky boy.
''The Windy City,'' Jimmy says, grinning.
Out on the highway, the traffic is moving again. Soon, so will I.
KAISER ARCHIVE