Abbot Farm
I remember you standing there in the morning mist, an old gray farm house with rambling front porch bent under the weight of many years, tired from supporting winter snow and being beaten by summer rains. Your outbuildings were still scattered around, squatting here and there, like chicks with a bit of freedom from the mother hen, content to explore a bit as long as they didn't go too far. Upon the edge of the parking lot for the shopping center known as Abbot Farm Plaza, you stood; a welcomed, weathered face in the early mornings when father and I would drive into town to get day-old produce and out of date cereal and bread from Pepe Coulombe at the Shop and Save. Recession hit our town and more stores closed in the plaza. The empty spaces waited customers who no longer came to visit empty, shuttered shops, gathering dust behind closed doors. Still the old farmhouse stood, a silent sentinel guarding a dying kingdom. The bailout came after years it seemed. Money was pumped into the local economy. The floundering mall was bought and renamed. An old empty farm house sitting by a newly revitalized mall really wasn't in the plans. One foggy day the firemen came with ladder trucks and bunker gear and great ceremony to do a controlled burn. Slowly the ladder was extended, fire applied to aging roof shingles. A spark caught and flame jumped about, while the men waited below to keep things going right... Soon enough the old farm house was just a pile, charred and smoldering. Such is the legacy of a tale a hundred years in the making. Bulldozers, bucket loaders, and trucks took away all the unburned pieces and buried the cellar hole in rich dark soil. Now grass grows next to smooth black top, and those who come to shop just see an empty field of green. A farm was sacrificed for future beauty, that old house a fading memory. I remember you standing there in the morning mist, an old gray farm house with rambling front porch bent under the weight of many years, tired from supporting winter snow and being beaten by summer rains.
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Sunlight On A Spiderweb
One morning while coffee cup wandering,
Saying good day to old sleepy horses
I noticed a spider’s web gently clinging
To a bent and old rusted steel gate.
Saying good day to old sleepy horses
Is a pretty nice way to greet the dawn
Of another soon to be busy farm day,
And I tend to dawdle with a kind word.
I noticed a spider’s web gently clinging
And paused long in examining strands,
The subtle perfection engaging my brain,
As I thought of Charlotte, and EB White.
To a bent and old rusted steel gate,
Perhaps morning sun on dew sparkling
on a spider web is only a fleeting beauty,
But it is beauty none-the-less!
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