The Sadness of Old Buildings

From the book No Smooshing!

For years, I’ve carried on a not-so-friendly debate with some of my creative person friends from the Occident Seashore about their ideas of what represents a good subject. We look to be able to hold on certain things, like apples and oranges—and even certain landscapes. But when it come ups to their pictures of bedraggled old farm buildings, we portion company.

Some folks see summation farmhouses and caved-in barns as romantic. Artists paint images of edifices with weathered boards, leaning at impossible angles—and people take those pictures home and hang them on their walls.

But for me, I see those same abandoned farmsteads as unspeakably sad. After all, each 1 of those boarded up farmhouses stands for the death of someone’s trusts and dreamings for the hereafter of their children and themselves.

I get the same sad feeling whenever I go through through a small town that was once a booming place, full of life and activity, but now sit downs empty and lifeless, slowly crumbling back into the achromatic Earth from which it sprang. Last week, I was lost on some dorsum route (not an unusual state of affairs for me) when I came across just such as a shade town.

There was no name that I could see, but there were three buildings, huddled adjacent to each other against the prairie wind, and I could still do out some faded letters above their doors. The first 1 had been a general store, the second a garage, but it was the 3rd edifice that captured my imagination. On its side was printed the word “Hotel.”

Hotel? The word seemed so incongruous. After all, what could have got got been the attraction in this small town that would have warranted a hotel? There didn’t look to be anything of interest in the area, and if any topographic point in the human race could have got been said to be in the center of nowhere, this small town was it!

And how did people get to this village in order to remain in this cryptic hotel? I saw no railway tracks, and there’s lone one route running through town.

The garage implied the town was still alive when cars came into general use, but cars have got been around a long time, and that still didn’t explicate the need for a hotel in a town with only two other buildings.

Perhaps that’s wherefore my creative person friends happen old edifices and farmsteads so intriguing. There’s definitely a sense of enigma about them—stories that volition never be known. On that much, we can agree. But no 1 can convert me those alone scenes are picturesque.

I can hardly look at old towns like that without being defeat with a unhappiness that’s hard to explain. What are the narratives of those desolate storefronts? Why did people come up to that small town and remain in their small hotel? What about the rusty skeletal system of a compound on the edge of town, its castanets bleaching in the sun?

I don’t know, and I never will—and ghosts don’t talk. Just don’t try to state me that such as a scene is something I’d desire to hang on my wall and expression at every day.

© 2004. Gary E. Anderson. All rights reserved.