Visible from a major roadway in Butler County, this sweet little farmhouse has been sitting empty for some 12 or 15 years. It looked almost idyllic when it was still somebody's home. I only know because we travel that direction for every holiday and family event, and you couldn't help but notice the place. The busy road was built unfortunately close to the house, and you could see the carefully tended lawn and the neatly kept old barn--which has since collapsed. It was a little piece of rural Americana, the kind of place that looked reassuringly safe and stable. When you see farms like this along the road, a part of your soul could almost whisper, "Let it always be thus. This is how our grandparents lived. This was the life they knew. Can't this always be here?"
Then, just over a decade ago, I noticed that the lawn had started to look a little ragged. No cars were ever parked in the driveway anymore. Someone still came by occasionally to mow, but not frequently and not very attentively. Years passed and the slapdash mowings came to an end altogether. The grass all went to seed. Neglected shrubs engulfed the pleasant front porch.
The place was still habitable, but clearly no one wanted to live here anymore. Maybe the noise from the nearby highway was just too much to take. With yet more time, I began to notice several windows standing vacant; either someone had vandalized the house or the old wooden panes started to get too weak to hold the glass in place when the wind was high.
Then the barn fell down. Someone came and carried away the debris, but still the house was left to decay slowly. Every time I drove past the place I would say to my kids, "I'm gonna get inside that house someday!" But these are the days when I must do the things I've been putting off for years. Why? Because if I don't do them now, during my sabbatical, then I'll have to admit that I was never going to do them in the first place--and that will cause me to give up on some strange hopes to which I'd been clinging.... Not to mention a few ideas about myself.
So instead of going back to the mountains near Altoona, I came here and kept an old promise. The front door had been broken down--which tells me that this place was kept locked up for some time, probably with the intention of someone's returning to it. Actually, you could probably still rescue this little place from a lonely fate. It would take a lot of work now that the roof is going bad and many of the windows are broken out, but it could be done.
Unlike the best bandos, there were no belongings left in this house, but I could still see what a comfortable place it must have been in its day--which was really not that long ago. It had a big, welcoming kitchen, a master bedroom just off the living room, and like I said, a really nice front porch--sheltered from the road by deep bushes.
I couldn't work up the nerve to go into the basement or up onto the second floor. I was convinced there would be rabid raccoons or some other vermin lurking about in those places. Noisy roadway notwithstanding, this could be such a beautiful place for someone who needed it. Why can't we give places like this to refugees or ex-cons or people who just want to move to the country but can't afford to do it? Big yard, nice trees, solid-looking outbuildings. Why must so many places like this go to waste when the world is swarming with displaced persons, desperate people, people who need exactly this--a place of their own, just a place to be home? Our problem is not that we live in a world where there's not enough for everyone; it's that we lack the goodwill and creativity to see to it that people get what they need. It makes me sad to see this little homestead withering away. I left with a keen sense of sorrow for such an enormous waste.
