Mad in January...

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness. 

― Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary 

January Barn 
Dublin, Ohio

scents of stories

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay...   ―W. Somerset Maugham 

Just as people are a mulligatawny mix, so are places.  They are bowls left with remnants of unique recipes, scraps and scents of stories, wanting to be savored, waiting to be told.  ―me 

image:  from my Abandoned America series, "T-Shirt Window", Delaware, Ohio

I say grace...

You say grace before meals.

All right.

But I say grace before the play and the opera,

And grace before the concert and pantomime,

And grace before I open a book,

And grace before sketching, painting,

Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;

And grace before I dip the pen in ink.

G. K. Chesterton, from an early notebook circa 1890s

I giggle at the thought of someone near and dear to those at Willow Manor, who never misses the chance to say grace before every meal, and who enjoys delivering extra loud, long graces in public places.  We all know those of a certain generation, who say a pre-meal grace almost superstitiously, like tossing salt over one's shoulder, or knocking on wood.  It's a lovely, nearly extinct tradition, that for today, may have lost its original purpose, its poetical beauty, and meaning.

With October already amazingly behind us, November brings thoughts of the Thanksgiving holiday, considering the year's "harvest".  In this modern age, most of us are not concerned on a daily basis with the actual process of cultivating our meals from the soil of the earth.  But I like the notion, just like G. K. Chesterton, of embracing the fruits of our labors, the embodiment of creativity, the beauty of daily routine, our personal harvests, so to speak, with a certain grace and appreciation. Yes, I say... grace.


image:  from my Abandoned America series, "Gloves in a Barn", Dublin, Ohio

no other end of the world

A Song on the End of the World


On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.


Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Anthony Milosz



This particular Milosz piece brings to mind the rather humorous story of my fourth great-grandfather, Rev. Robert Goodloe Harper Hanna. "Harper" was one of the earliest clergy in Carroll County, Indiana. He belonged to a denomination known as the Primitive Methodists and preached the Millerite doctrine. If he believed this radical doctrine, personally, he certainly failed to impress the outside world with his sincerity.

Here's the account, according to the History of Carroll County, Indiana by Thomas Helms, Chicago: Kingman Brothers, 1882...

One morning in April, 1848, John Payton rode by Hanna's farm and saw him setting out an orchard. The inconsistency of his preceding at once struck Payton, who elected that a number of years must elapse, in any event, before he could expect any return of his labor, and if the final destruction of the world were so nearly at hand, was not his an unnecessary outlay of labor? 

With this in mind, Payton addressed him: 

"How is this, Brother Hanna? This is April, and if your account is correct, the end of the world will come in June next. It scarcely looks consistent to be doing such work so nearly the borders of eternity." 

"Oh well", replied Hanna, "we can't tell exactly; there may have been an error in the calculation."

my trusty '96 Land Rover at an abandoned farm
Dublin, Ohio
click to embiggen

frayed and flaky around the edges

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. 

I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. 

We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

--Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed

click to embiggen

images: abandoned farm, Dublin, Ohio

Because someone has to remember...

“I like places like this," he announced.

I like old places too," Josh said, "but what's to like about a place like this?"

The king spread his arms wide. "What do you see?"

Josh made a face. "Junk. Rusted tractor, broken plow, old bike."

Ah...but I see a tractor that was once used to till these fields. I see the plow it once pulled. I see a bicycle carefully placed out of harm's way under a table."

Josh slowly turned again, looking at the items once more.

And I see these things and I wonder at the life of the person who carefully stored the precious tractor and plow in the barn out of the weather, and placed their bike under a homemade table."

Why do you wonder?" Josh asked. "Why is it even important?"

Because someone has to remember," Gilgamesh snapped, suddenly irritated. "Some one has to remember the human who rode the bike and drove the tractor, the person who tilled the fields, who was born and lived and died, who loved and laughed and cried, the person who shivered in the cold and sweated in the sun." He walked around the barn again, touching each item, until his palm were red with rust." It is only when no one remembers, that you are truely lost. That is the true death.”   


--Michael Scott, The Sorceress

click to embiggen

For more in my series Abandoned America, click on the label at the end of this post.
Images: abandoned farm, Dublin, Ohio

abandoned america iv

The Barn and the Down


It stood in the sunset sky
Like the straight-backed down,
Many a time - the barn
At the edge of the town,

So hug and dark that it seemed
It was the hill
Till the gable's precipice proved
it impossible.

The great down in the west
Grew into sight,
A barn stored full to the ridge
With black of night;

And the barn fell to a barn
Or even less
Before critical eyes and its own
Late mightiness.

But far down and near barn and I
Since then have smiled,
Having seen my new cautiousness
By itself beguiled

To disdain what seemed the barn
Till a few steps changed
It past all doubt to the down;
So the barn was avenged.


Edward Thomas

click to embiggen

abandoned america iii

Nails

Aliens would render us useless

if they sucked all our nails

with some powerful magnet

like a big vacuum sweeping

up bobby pins

we would be a mess

without our carpet tacks

and gutter spikes

penny size brads

hammered down with the gusto

and sweat of a nation's brawn

a rapture of galvanized proportions

they'd leave the buns and beehives

of our landscape

in disheveled heaps, raped

uncoiffed bedrooms and barns

bad hair days scattered

across America

Tess Kincaid

nails, abandoned barn, Dublin, Ohio
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Recorded by the talented R.A.D. Stainforth.  Check out his excellent blog, Black Dogs.

abandoned america ii

abandoned barn, Dublin, Ohio, July 2011
click to embiggen

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops, the nettles now.

This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.


Edward Thomas  1878-1917

Thanks to R.A.D. Stainforth for this lovely poem.

abandoned america

abandoned barn, Dublin, Ohio
(click to embiggen)

There is something very nostalgic, mysteriously magical, so bleakly wondrous that draws me to abandoned places: farm houses, out-buildings, barns.  I love feeling the leftover energies, the stories left behind in the rubble.  It's like an archaeological dig, the forgotten objects buried in time and dust, above ground. They are a lovely quintessential American art form in themselves. Even though long empty, this particular barn smells of cows, oil and old wood; its history is intensely palpable.

As my Facebook friends know, I've been posting a series of photos titled "Abandoned America", most of which I took in and around my neck of the woods, Central Ohio.  Hope you enjoy these places, truly majestic in their own right, as much as I did.  Stay tuned for more images in the coming weeks.

Another night, I dreamed 

I saw my father sweeping 

out the barn floor clean, 

and would not suffer the wheat 

to be brought in the barn. 

He appeared to me to be in anger.

Joanna Southcott