Your Story:Fallen Asunder

· by · in Barns, Drive-By Photo Shootings, Historical, Nature, Story Time. ·

This old abandoned house has caught my eye for several months now.  I drive by it everyday on Interstate 71.  I know there has to be an interesting story behind it.  Tell me the story.

Your Story is a SethSnap series in which you get to decide the story behind the photo.  You can write a story, a poem or even just one word.  You decide.  Put on your best 1888 suit or dress, wear your fancy hat, and go! To see previous Your Story posts click on “Story Time” on the right.

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93 responses to “Your Story:Fallen Asunder”

  2. I wanted to share something with you…the value in your posts. I have been ill this past year and unable to experience life outside my home. Every time you post I get to go on an adventure, share in something beautiful; and I am thankful. I thought you should know that.

  3. A sweet woman of 82 years named Lily loves this little white house. It’s just her size since she has no husband or children. She arises each morning and goes to the window and watches for the deer. She sprinkles corn for him each night. Birds come to the bird feeder chickadees, finches, etc. Lily loves nature and feels akin to it. It’s comfort to her. Once she finishes that part of her morning routine she sits down with the iPad her nephew gave her. This is so she can feel akin to her kin! She loves her family that lives in West Palm Beach and it’s much comfort to keep in close touch with them.

  6. If Walls Could Talk

    From the road the barn is small
    Before the setting sun
    Through the years as memories fade
    The journey finally done.

    From the road the barn is old
    The field barren and brown
    Through the years she did her work
    Her stories buried in its ground.

    From the road the barn can talk
    I hear her scream her truth
    She may be weathered, weak and worn
    But her walls hold all the proof.

  7. Dark and quiet have settled over the land. He lights the stove and fills the coffee pot with water and ground coffee. His tired body settles into the old kitchen chair and he removes his worn boots. Once again, too tired and achy to think about cooking a meal, Jake Winstead listened to the coffee perk. It was nights like these that he missed his wife the most. He could still remember her flaky biscuits so well he could almost taste them. “Oh, Martha, why did you have to leave me here alone?” Tears fell from old Jake’s dim eyes as the loneliness cut deep into his heart. He sat and listened to a far away dog and the crickets beneath the window as he drank his thick, black coffee.

  8. I can almost smell the hub of the kitchen..scents of fresh bread and big pots of meat simmering with fresh vegetables.
    Vegetables that were sown in the hopes of baskets one day to be full with all the rewards of toil and sweat,still dew covered and little snails peeking out from crispy leaves of green.
    I can almost hear the bustle of boots being put on and coats being grabbed,racing out of squeaking doors to witness the birth of the first spring lambs.
    Lambs that will fill childrens hearts with joy as they gambol and play in paddocks green and lush.Lambs ,that with mixed emotions, will be put to the pot providing for hungry mouths.
    I can almost feel the sadness as the last generation turns it’s back on a once vibrant and thriving landscape.
    A landscape that has seen no rain for too long,earth cracked and bare desperate for a drink . Now barren and unable to sustain family life.
    I can almost see the young couple full of dreams, inhaling deeply as the hammer goes down and they realise this is now their home.
    A home they have plans for,she wants vegetables and animals,he wants somewhere to raise his children in safety and with old fashioned values…the rains came,they soaked the earth,the first tender shoots have started to breach the soil.
    The cycle of life.

  10. Out here in the house the silence is like a presence. It is as thick as the layering of paint on the old bedroom walls. I come here when I need time out.
    Lately that’s been a lot. There’s so much going on in the world right now. Sometimes the babble of it all gets too much. I turn off the TV, the internet and the radio and drive out to the house.
    It stands pretty much the way it did when old Maggie, my aunt left it the day she died. Her complicated Will means that all of us nieces and nephews have equal shares in the place. There are 17 of us and none of us want to be the one that demands we sell the place. Instead we all have a key and access to the place any time we feel a need for its quiet embrace. Its solitude and its peace.
    What I wish is that all people in the world had a place like this to retreat to.

  13. I stand alone…all alone. The sun shines, the rain pours, the wind howls all around me. Yet I am here, still here…always here.

  14. Where we live, in Portugal, the area is littered with abandoned and unfinished houses. Some old, some new, some just started and then left. Even in the centre of towns, used and unused buildings are mixed together. I find it quite unusual… Keith.

  15. Absolute stunning … photo … the light – the sky .. everything about it.
    – my story????!!! One more payment and it’s yours.

  16. I sit alone and wonder why,
    the sun and moon sits in the sky.
    Why rivers run below so deep,
    or the grass keeps growing beneath my feet.
    The paint on my walls begins to flake,
    as the sound of silence makes my insides ache.
    Nobody knocks upon my door,
    I get no visitors anymore.
    Don’t walk on by, end your roam,
    and in return, I’ll provide your home.

    [abandoned: 2013]

  19. The house creaked and sagged into the rich soil amongst chicken feed and corn fields. They wanted to extend a nature preserve onto the corner of her lot in an effort to restore native foliage, but she refused. Now the whole town was up in arms with what to do about the stubborn lady who showed no interest and in fact a strong abhorance to preserving the local ecology.

    I was at her house this Wednesday afternoon to interview her about the issue so I could put a few quotes in my story for the paper. I sat, a guest in her ancient cave, and posed my first and last question. I hoped the discussion would be short.

    “Miss Amundsen, why don’t you want to sell your land to the Mabel Country Land Conservation Society?”

    Instead of the concise and answer I needed to meet my 5 o’ clock dealine, I had unearthed a long history of the land from her memory.

    “My grandparents settled the plot in the the 1850s after a long haul westward. They were Norwegian immigrants and didn’t know anything about the Indians who were kicked off it by the government before they got there. They planted potatoes and herbs that first year. You know, enough to get by. By the time my father was born, he said there were fields upon fields of corn and soybeans that they sold to people around the state. It was a vegetable metropolis.”

    She measured the time when she lived in the house in terms of her marriage to a man named Bill and their five children. There was the cute baby era followed by the chaotic toddler years, then endearing elementary school, a middle school stretch that was far too long, high school, and then college.

    I couldn’t help but notice the unopened doors lining the room. They were hidden behind antique furniture and seemed more like decoration than functional pieces of the home.

    “What’s behind these doors?” I asked abruptly, interrupting her description of her eldest son’s current job search.

    “Oh there are old bedrooms. There’s nothing in there.”

    “Is it ok if I check them out?”

    “Well sure.”

    I got up and pushed aside a giant teddy bear to open the door closest to me. Inside, the Midwestern wind blustered through the open window. The room was crammed with stacks of books, stacks of newspapers, magazines, and records. Letters were strewn across a writing desk, and and unhung paintings leaned against the walls.

    I sat down on an old piano bench and shivered. I wondered how I would record my life. Would it be on papers made of pixels which would disintegrate in the cyber vortex or on sheets to be pummeled and pulped into new paper with a new life and a different story?

    I wanted to throw my phone out the window and begin a practice of communicating solely by letter. Instead I reached my hand into my coat pocket to make sure my phone was still there and returned to the dining room where Miss Amundsen sat

  21. Susan Stanfield sat near the middle with the other junior high girls on the yellow, ’59 Ford school bus. Her little brother, James–he didn’t like to be called Jim or Jimmy–was in third grade.

    Theirs was the third stop on the way to school on Millersburg Rd. that eventually came out on State Rt. 37. James always fidgeted waiting near the rusty mailbox. Sometimes he’d flip the red mailbox flag up
    and down until Susan laid down the law. Other times he’d demonstrate feats of strength, by trying to push over the mailbox post. He was showing off for girls on the approaching school bus.

    Susan stood quietly reading a library book while playing with her dark wavy hair. James knew just how far he could push her. He listened, because like most sisters, Susan would tell on him later. There’d be hell to pay.

    Mr. Stanfield, the father, worked fifteen miles away at a farm equipment dealer as a mechanic. After several years, when James was in high school, Mr. Stanfield got another job in Virginia and they moved away. There was only one other tenant–a young couple with a small daughter.

    The house and outbuildings were used for storage by the landowner. Haybales were stacked in rooms downstairs until the roof leaked from disrepair. This had been the birthplace of the landowner’s father and grandfather. It was left as a decaying momument to their memories.

    Theirs was

  24. That house is haunted. Everybody knows it. It has been on the market for a while. IF I lived there, I’d buy the house and write it’s story. Maybe the spirits will be freed or at least find peace if it’s story was told. EVERYBODY- even ghosts have stories.

  25. a harsh summer
    dried pea’s and dirt
    a wicked winter
    piercing tired bones
    scattered aimlessly
    in the wind

  27. The house was designed and built Dr Josiah Colantro back in the 1880s.
    He was an old school GP. Home visits, knew everyones name. Watched them come into this world and cared from them on the way out.
    He was highly respected; after all, no doctor, no town, but it was more than dependence that caused people to respect and love him.
    He lived and worked in that house for many years until finally it passed to his son and finally to his grand son. I say finally because it was events in the modern era that saw this house fall into disrepair.

    People often told Simon Colantro that he had a gear loose.
    He was used to derogatory remarks, he had heard them all his life.
    But, someone once said that you get what you focus on so I suppose it was not really a surprise when it happened.
    He collapsed in the waiting room of a famous dentist and was rushed to the Emergency Ward of the local hospital.
    His grandfather was a GP back in the day and this hospital was one of his legacies. He fought tooth and nail to have it established, so it was fitting that his grandson should receive care at this establishment.
    He was rushed to surgery and discharged within ten days; he was a quick healer.
    The worn gear that they removed from his head went home with him in a glass jar.
    The hospital staff were sworn to secrecy but there were still rumours.
    People in a small town being what they are eventually drove Simon Colantro from his home. He was different and they were not going to tolerate different.

    No one really knows what happened to Simon but one thing is for sure; rust was his constant companion.

    Terry

  29. Dusky, like the colors in my grandmother’s duster, the huge dress that she wore ever day I ever saw her. Every day, she donned a different dress, the same dusky colors, large prints, barren of interest; her personality lost in folds of fabric. Smiling her pink plaster smile at my hopeful upturned look, never dusting in her duster, every surface always spotless, wiped clean of every evidence of life.

    Sparse and windblown, like Grandma’s graying thin brown hair, each permed curl standing out at an odd angle from her scalp like the spindly, lone tree bending away from earth’s scalp.

    Cold, like the feeling I had after staying with Grandma for an obligatory day or two. Even the clouds are stretched to their limit of endurance, color seeping from them leaving them dusky, dim and dull, the day’s promise drawn away by the wind. One can almost feel a storm brewing.

    Boxy house shaped like Grandma, square, clean, and boring. Her little square house with shiny hardwood floors covered with a million throw rugs that tripped Grandpa as he scratched from room to room with his walker. Outside red roses grew on the trellis, a spot of unexpected beauty against the white frame wall.

    The look of my paternal Grandma.

  30. I fly high and low, then I saw this pitched house below..very ordinary but was so calm ..I thought to myself let me get my love..she agreed instantly and we built oue nest within the pitched roof and then took some rest..soon the house was filled with chirping sound..the young onse had come to enliven our nest..the inmates were sweet..they left few crumbs for us to eat..but I would fly for fresh catch..small insects were best and young ones loved to chew :)) slowly..they spread their wings and learned to swing fron branch to top of this house..and we watched them all go..one by one..then no more ..we wanted to stay..and we said good day that morning we flew away..but I still remember that house..lonely it stood but was warm and cosy..

  31. Pingback: Fallen asunder | justmomentarily·

  32. There is such a house in near this quiet little I have moved to to take better care of my daughter who had a mystery illness until most recently. And every now and then I pass in front of that house and wonder as you do about its life. Perhaps I will take a photo of it and post it. 🙂 Love you blog!

  33. There is such a house in near this quiet little I have moved to to take better care of my daughter who had a mystery illness until most recently. And every now and then I pass in front of that house and wonder as you do about its life. Perhaps I will take a photo of it and post it. 🙂 Love your blog!

  34. Something didn’t seem right. In one instant, there was no barn ready to collapse. In another, it was ready to fall in the slightest of breezes. I may need to replace my glasses to get rid of these parallax visions. 🙂

  36. These were the stories of long ago, the things now only spoken in fairy tales. My mother had read them to me, even shown me pictures to go with the stories. I’ve heard whispers late into the night of pioneers from so long ago, those who forged the way to make us who we are today. They built houses with their own two hands, worked the land, and plowed away for their families to survive.

    Once, in a very old photo, I saw with my own eyes one of these things called farms. It was beautiful, beyond words. I’ve often wondered what the earth looked like before the Great War. I left the photo behind, hidden in an old shelter, the day we fled from the Gaynton Armies, but I run the photo over and over again in my head trying to recall every detail.

    I’ve made sketches every chance I could find paper, but I never get the details quite right. It’s hard for me to imagine a land of green, a house built by people just struggling to survive off the land. The tales have spoken about animals, creatures used for both food and companionship, though I’ve never seen them.

    But maybe, just maybe those tales of long ago aren’t fairy tales at all, but truth. And maybe, just maybe there really is hope for all us to find that life again too. Someday, I will find that shelter where the photo is hidden and I know in my heart we will be that way again…. someday. Until then, I’ll hold that photo in my heart.

  37. Reblogged this on My A-muse-ing Life and commented:
    These were the stories of long ago, the things now only spoken in fairy tales. My mother had read them to me, even shown me pictures to go with the stories. I’ve heard whispers late into the night of pioneers from so long ago, those who forged the way to make us who we are today. They built houses with their own two hands, worked the land, and plowed away for their families to survive.

    Once, in a very old photo, I saw with my own eyes one of these things called farms. It was beautiful, beyond words. I’ve often wondered what the earth looked like before the Great War. I left the photo behind, hidden in an old shelter, the day we fled from the Gaynton Armies, but I run the photo over and over again in my head trying to recall every detail.

    I’ve made sketches every chance I could find paper, but I never get the details quite right. It’s hard for me to imagine a land of green, a house built by people just struggling to survive off the land. The tales have spoken about animals, creatures used for both food and companionship, though I’ve never seen them.

    But maybe, just maybe those tales of long ago aren’t fairy tales at all, but truth. And maybe, just maybe there really is hope for all us to find that life again too. Someday, I will find that shelter where the photo is hidden and I know in my heart we will be that way again…. someday. Until then, I’ll hold that photo in my heart.

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