Maybe you've seen one like it on one of those back roads outside the city.
Just about all that remains is a shell.
Imposing brick walls, crumbling but standing tall. Windows glinting in the sun. Cold chimney rising through a pointless roof.
Look closely - you can practically see the kids running around the house playing tag or throwing a ball around the great big farm yard.
Yellow daffodils bloom alongside the front door and even more at the side entry where everyone knows to walk in through the screen door that announces new arrivals with a loud bang.
A long clothes line stretches the length of the house out back laden with socks, underwear, overalls, and work shirts.
Some chickens scramble around the garden wondering if they might be invited to the next Sunday dinner.
A short walk away is the barn. It too is still standing... waiting and wondering if it's useful life is past and resigned to photographs and fading memories.
The memories stretch a hundred years or more. It took a successful gentleman farmer to build a home like this one for his wife and family.
At first, the 40 acres was more than enough to feed a family and grow a living from the fertile soil. But when John Deere replaced the Percheron and Clydesdale horses, the acreage got bigger.
More corn, more cows, more children in the house, a second generation, and a third.
The Great Depression couldn't empty the house. But time and progress march on and it takes fewer farmers and smaller families to work the land than it once did.
The big house on the tattered estate is on life support - it might make it with some "Extreme" form of make-over and an owner with enough love, passion, and money to apply the paddles and pump new life into it.
Until and unless - it sits. Empty except the footprints and fingerprints of history written in lowercase; part of rural Wisconsin's and America's changing landscape.
Comments
Post a Comment