It is the sort of place I should like to walk to, and sit near, every day. Unlike most ruins, whose remote age make them seem not quite human, like part of nature � just another collection of rock and trees � the farmhouse, by its relative familiarity, arouses my imagination. Folk, I feel, don't just know, were born and lived and died here not so long ago; but all that now records their existence is a charred structure in a dead landscape. It has the same effect on me as an ancient tombstone, mossy, crumbling hinting obscurely at people I can't help imagining � causing me to wonder whose feet stood where I stand and looked back at the house? Only the sun did not shine in their eyes, but was blocked by a glittering weather vain. What sweet aromas of wind mingled with ripe fresh-picked corn, floated to set nostrils quivering � like mine at the memory? Who slept in the shade of tall corn-stalks, beside the fields where I now feel the wind rushing mercilessly over the barren ground. Bleak house � grey fields! The memory of lives played out on a sunnier day lingers still.
In the Winter the scene is even more desolate, when the black buildings rise like burnt stumps, alone in a white plane. Or in the Fall mornings, when fog from the river rolls heavily over the fields parting ever and again, to reveal a ghostly glimpse of sooty, wind-worn brick, or a stark tree swaying inside a window.
The house has new inhabitants now � trees and birds and rabbits have claimed it for their own. Vines creep up the walls, accomplishing more effectively the demolition than the court-restrained bull-dozer ever could; and tree branches stir where candles used to burn in farmhouse windows. Down by the river, a rail-road brings its noisy trains rumbling past, but no children run out to wave, only rabbits shy and hide in the charred enclosure, and birds are momentarily drowned out.
I like to think that what most people consider ghosts are just memories inherent in a place. I like to imagine that if I sat near the old farmhouse long enough, eventually my own vagrant fancy would twine with these memories � that my imagination would be guided down paths of what once was, or might have been. Then I see in my mind, a place where the trees were thicker and the fields cultivated � another place, it seems, but it's only another time � and I like to imagine that once, this was the country-side and not the wilderness.
©Copyright, 2004, Robert Quiller