Old Farm Houses

I Always Wonder….

/ cigarman501 / 7 Comments

There is an abandoned house I walk past every morning when I force myself out to walk or run.  Yeah, I’m trying to jog a bit these days.  Slow and easy…slow and not so easy.  Try not to have a second heart attack or pull a muscle.

At a curve of the road below what has become my ‘hill from hell’, an old home sits forlornly surrounded by broom straw, English ivy, hemlock, and juvenal river birch.  It has sat empty for the past thirty years.  I vaguely remember people living there a long time ago.  They were solitary people who looked at you side-eyed when you drove by.  They were here today gone tomorrow folks it seems.

I stood, stretching after a five-minute warm-up.  Trying to steel myself for the quarter-mile trek up the hill, I paused and took a picture as I paused.

Have I said that I like old structures?  I like wandering through them looking at how they were built.  I like wondering about who lived there.  I hate to see old houses abandoned into ruin.

Once, a lifetime ago, I dared to investigate.  I’m not built for creeping or sneaking a look through windows.   Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me.  Don’t fear, I’m not a Peeping Tom.  I knew the place was empty.  I just wondered why they had left in such a hurry.  Looking through windows gave me no clue, only more questions.

Much of the furniture was still in place as if the people who lived there just went off to work or out for dinner, locked the door behind them, and never came back.  A plush easy chair and matching settee but no TV.  No lightened spaces on the walls where paintings or pictures might have hung.  I wonder why furniture and kitchen implements were left behind?   Why did the previous tenants skedaddle leaving so much behind?

There had been people there recently.  A stack of pyramided beer cans attested to their visitation.  Uninvited visitors disturbing the mice, taking advantage of an empty house.  Young people looking for a place to hang out but twenty or thirty years later it’s not a place I would want to spend any kind of “quality” time.

As I took the picture I saw only remnants of Venetian blinds and shredded curtains hanging in the windows.  Windowpanes have been knocked out and I imagine the furniture is covered in black mold or worse.  Still, I wonder…but not enough to go check.  It is a shame and a bit heartbreaking.

The house sits in a steep-sided ‘holler’ split by the road I walk. It is at the base of ‘The Hill From Hell.’  I’ve officially named it.  It rises two hundred feet over two-tenths of a mile.  There was a time when I ran it…that time has run out.

A rocky, shallow stream runs under the road and in front of the house with juvenal river birch taking over between the stream and porch.  Despite its shallowness, the stream runs quite fast.  I wonder why the original owners decided to put their home in a hole that gets very little sunlight.  Access to the water I wonder?

The original house was a sturdy, shed-roofed affair with a narrow screened in front porch.  What appears to be a rebuilt chimney dominates one side.  It looks too new…despite having been there for at least thirty years.  I wonder what the original chimney looked like.  Was it rock like mine, made from stones found in the area?  Was it added as an afterthought during summer after a long, cold winter?

A low and long addition was built on the opposite side.  It matches the original building like a scary horror movie and has not held up well to being left empty.  Loneliness destroys us all.

The screens on the porch are shredded and the tar paper and asphalt shingles have not held up as well as the metal sheets on the original.  The roof reminds me of an old swayback plow horse.

I wonder how many generations lived there, how they survived, what they did for a living.  What were their dreams?  I wonder how they lived and loved, what they ate, what games they played.  Were their lives as hard as my imagination leads me to believe.

Spring is three weeks away and the daffodils are showing themselves near the ditch that separates the house site from the road.  They have pushed up through a stand of blue-purple blossomed periwinkle.

Soon they will be spent and replaced by moon vine in mid-summer and the sickly, sweet smell of blossoming kudzu in the fall.    If enough sunlight can reach the yard, wildflowers will bloom in the late summer.  I wonder if someone once tended to their flowers long, long ago.

Each summer kudzu above the old house creeps closer and closer.  I wonder if it will eventually cover the old house or if someone will come along and knock the house down putting it out of its misery.  Either way, it will disappear from sight…disappear from history leaving no trace of itself or the people who lived there.  I wonder.

***

Don Miller is a retired teacher and coach who writes on various subjects, in both fiction and non-fiction.  Visit his author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM.

The image is of the lonesome old house taken with my phone.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

/ cigarman501 / 2 Comments

 

I have a vision of our old farmhouse before we renovated.  Gray-silver metal roof shingles streaked with rust.  One bathroom with a bathtub and no shower.  An unheated upstairs and air-conditioned nowhere at all.  A fairly large kitchen despite the old woodstove with a walk-in pantry that was quite spacious.  A doorway leading to a stoop that led to a…patio?  On the other side of the kitchen, a doorway led to a small back porch holding among other things, a washer and dryer that we feared would freeze every winter and hid a rat snake during the summer.

The old home was quaint and comfortable unless you wanted to be warm in the winter or cool in the summer…or if you wanted to take a shower.  In 1995 we decided we would renovate.  Not much you understand.  We would take off and seven hundred and fifty square feet of kitchen and pantry while adding an upstairs bedroom and bath, with a shower of course, and a new kitchen, dining room, den and a half bath with shower downstairs.  Later we would replace the roof and all of the old wavy, paint-streaked, lead glass windows.  A total of about two thousand square feet replaced the original seven hundred and fifty…but it hasn’t replaced the memory of the old place and now the thoughts that usually begin “I wish.”

It’s not that Linda and I don’t appreciate being able to take a shower, we do, but we miss the quaintness.  We also miss the huge pantry…especially Linda Gail.  The huge fireplace in the den is a great conversation piece with its handmade “chainsawed” walnut mantle and huge centerpiece stone but sometimes I miss the original fireplace and wood stove.

There is a little bit of pride that goes with saying, “The flooring and cabinets came from pecan and walnut trees from the property…as did the table and kitchen island.”  Even when the table and island warp upward in the winter and downward in the summer.

For some reason, it is just not the same.  We lost the upstairs cubby hole with the pitter-patter of little “flying squirrel” feet and the slithering of rat snake non-feet.  That is actually a bad thing.

It is both funny and odd what Linda Gail misses and she is going to kill me when she sees this in print.  It’s okay Linda Gail, there are still some secrets I will never tell.  When we renovated the old bathroom we changed the location of the toilet.  Linda can no longer sit and see the birds dining in the feeder from her new “perch.”  This is something she reminds me of quite often.

Linda Gail and I aren’t angry. We just wish we had had a crystal ball or maybe enough money for just a little “do-over.”  Are there renovation “Mulligans?”  I guess not.  We thought we were outgrowing our little farmhouse and instead, we found we just overfill whatever space we have.  The good news is that we overfill that space with memories too…good ones.

There are other lessons we continue to learn from living in a house that originally dates from 1890 or so.  Not the least of which is, “Renovations are never completed.”  A new water heater or two to go with replacing the heating system or a leak here or there.  It is odd, knock on wood, “Seems as if everything replaced seems to be the first to go, having to be replaced again.”  Is that the designed obsolescence I’ve heard so much about?

Excerpt from Through the Front Gate by Don Miller which can be purchased or downloaded at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

The image is of the old portion of the house, my little piece of heaven.

Waiting for the Sun

/ cigarman501 / 2 Comments

I feel the cold seeping into my bones. The cold and the darkness. The same ambiance that makes our home such a wonderful conversation piece is freezing me to death. Behind those beautiful beadboard walls is…nothing…but the cold.

I wonder…how much my shivering is the old farmhouse’s lack of insulation and how much is just me. There was a time when all it took was a minimal movement to create heat and perspiration. A byproduct of my weight loss or my age?

I am depressed…it makes the cold worse. I shouldn’t sit in the dark, but I am desperately searching for a hint of light on the southeastern horizon but it is not yet visible through my French doors. Maybe when I see it I’ll turn on the overhead light. I despise the winter, I hate the cold.

I often wonder about the people who lived here before me and how they survived the cold. There are five fireplaces in my old home. I doubt the former tenants could have kept them all fed because the one I still use, the one I sit close to warming my feet, has a voracious appetite. I have a chainsaw…they had crosscut saws and axes. My chainsaw wears me out…quickly…but it does cause me to sweat. Splitting the wood makes me sweat. Firewood heats you several times I guess.

I think I know where the people before me congregated, trying to stay warm, trying to sit out the winter…although I doubt there was much sitting as they cut the wood to feed the fireplaces. The beadboard in the old dining room is darkened from what I suspect is the many wood fires lit in its double fireplace. There or in front of the old wood burning stove I found in rusted pieces in a ravine behind my house. I can visualize the former tenants wrapped in handmade, patchwork quilts sitting close to the fireplace attempting to warm themselves. Shivering as the north wind made its presence known…basking in the feeble light. With it dipping into teens in the South Carolina mountains, I think you can keep your good old days.

I need to go walk. My armor against depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder. The southeastern horizon has lightened but I wait for the sun to peak above the tall trees on the hillside’s crest. We are still eight days from the winter solstice and the shortest daylight of the year. Seven hours, forty-five minutes and a few seconds before the days begin to lengthen again. With the mountains in the west, less sun for me I think. It seems a lifetime until the summer solstice.

I’m reminded of an old Sunray’s song,

“I live for the sun (sun sun sun sun)
Because it makes fun (fun)
Pretty girls with their guys
Such a love you can’t buy
Baby, we all live for the sun.”

A cheesy, wannabe Beach Boys kind of song. I don’t know about the fun but the sun gives me hope and the illusion of warmth. “(I) live for the sun.”

Don Miller is a multi-genre, Indie writer. Please drop by his author’s page on Amazon at http://amazon.com/author/cigarman501.