Thursday February 11, 2021

Three Books

 

I had the opportunity to rummage through an old farmstead that was destined to be bulldozed and buried. Amid a thinning woodlot where trees grew up through old car and tractor tires, and shiny old chrome bumpers stood on end leaning against tree trunks there were several tumbledown outbuildings. Old cars and tractors littered the homestead; some had been hauled away on flatbed trailers. As for what was in the buildings, no one cared. The old equipment could be sold as scrap or held some potential, but the rest of it was doomed to extinction.
 

 I had permission to be there, so spent the better part of one day taking my time looking through someone else’s lives. The inhabitants were long gone, dead and buried; the only thing left of them were the stories neighbors and distant family remembered and handfuls of old photos of them and others who no people living today remembered anymore, except as a guess or assumption.
 

 I was in an old bunkhouse, is what I’d call it. There were two steel-framed coil spring beds, a bureau, and a bunch of old clothing piled onto a water-stained mattress; I wore a facemask in the confines not wanting my asthma to act up in there. Dust hung in suspension in the sunlight that streamed through holes in the roof and what dirty window panes were still intact. Floral design wall paper, hung loose and curled from the yellowed plaster walls. The woodwork still held close to the ceilings and doors in places. A pile of ancient Wannaska Creamery receipts were piled one upon the other on a little shelf just inside an outside door. Several years worth of OK Machine farm implement calendars hung on the wall, above where old leather boots laid on almost indiscernible linoleum flooring, either side of a worn-in track across it linking the two rooms, fuel oil stove, and kitchen.

 

This was where I had found the moldy black cloth purse full of old postcards, tightly bound together with string, that I was able to slowly dry over the course of a year, and eventually peel apart. Postcards like these and more are shown in my blog post Wannaskawriter https://palmvilletownshipmn.blogspot.com/2020/07/catch-up-series-image-albums-2020-2.html

 

 

In the past ten years or so this farmstead has disappeared, all plowed under. The only thing that remains of its over one hundred year existence is the field crossing that once was the beginning of its driveway just southwest of the Palmville Cemetery. I know this is just change, progress, and the way of things so often in farm country, but I don't think its wrong to acknowledge who once lived there even if you never knew them as friends or neighbors. 

I found these three books in some of my archived unorganized RAVEN stuff; their covers loose, pages looser; water-stained and frail. They've 'lived' much longer than their owners did, I reckon, and if I hadn't found them in those old buildings, they'd be six feet under too -- where they're apt to be after I die too, for better condition copies are available on-line.

Ten Nights in a Bar Room: And What I Saw There was written by TS Arthur in 1854. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Nights_in_a_Bar-Room_and_What_I_Saw_There