Broken Dreams-Talbot Trail

Broken Dreams-Talbot Trail
Originally uploaded by Alan Norsworthy

Old, forgotten, abandoned houses and farms, even entire towns!

Over the years I have spent a lot of time wandering around these treasures and the same thoughts creep into my conscious mind:

What happened here?
Where did the people go?
Why?

To me, abandoned places are like landlocked Marie Celeste’s.
Some fully furnished, food in the cupboard .. never open a fridge or a freezer though..

Beds still with sheets, Books and reading glasses, dishes in the kitchen, newspapers and calendars from long ago everything is there except the people.

Is it one’s imagination that runs away or are there still occupants in some of these places? Well sometimes they are there not in human form but their essence, their spirit remains. Sometimes only in a barely tangible form, sometimes more so.

If walls could talk what stories would they tell?
Standing quietly sometimes there are whispers, but the whole story is never clear.

In the end all there is left is a sadness, an emptiness.
Lost hopes and dreams lie scattered amongst the detritus of lives hard lived but we cannot hear them, these stories are gone along with the occupants.

Even more sad is the knowing that the bulldozers await. They will come to tear out the remaining soul and erase forever the memory of these places so we can replace them with yet another mall ...

They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow....
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
~Alan Jay Lerner, "The First Thing You Know," Paint Your Wagon, 1969