Shadows and moss

The other week, while exploring the countryside, as I need to do on occasion to get far away from everything, I traveled down a favorite dirt road into the middle of nowhere and came to the old, familiar abandoned house that sits in a grove of huge live oak trees, and is surrounded by deep woods, marsh, and open space. It sits there in silence, inexorably decaying, wooden 2×4 by 2×4, tilting ever more slightly on its side, a little bit closer to collapse than the previous year or two when I last visited this faraway kingdom where I have yet to see anyone but myself venture. I am always the lone, temporary inhabitant.

I get out of my car and walk to the sagging porch and look at the creepers and vines and imagine the whole house covered one day with them. I look in on the living room and see the familiar fallen plaster and trash on the floor, the stray pieces of furniture left behind. Doors open to other empty rooms.

In the low light of a late winter afternoon there is no burst of sunlight to redeem the place from the darkening shadows of a day nearly gone. The whole place has about it a mysterious air of foreboding, as do all abandoned and empty structures that once were the dwelling places of families so long ago.

It is strange, though. For six years I have been coming here, and always the house looks the same. I know it will eventually be gone, but it never seems to change. Such is the slow, imponderable way of decay. This shell, this encasing of former lives, maybe have been an old hunting lodge at one time. It obviously is not a farmhouse. It is too remote. Cut off from everything.

As I stand outside under the big live oaks, looking at this rather forlorn structure, teeteriing only in my imagination on collapse into a pile of lumber and metal roof, I cannot say that I am sad. Life is a series of beginnings and endings. We leave behind many of our former residences, and, although they may not be abandoned in the countryside, they are parts of ourselves left behind. And so I see this place. Once people enjoyed life here in this wooded retreat. It is so perfectly quiet. The dirt road sees only an occasional car. Hawks are always soaring high overhead above the tops of pine trees. Trails and paths wander off into the woods and lead to the marshes.

But sometimes it is a bit too remote and mysterious for me. And I cut short my visit as I did recently. I had seen enough. Time to leave this realm of shadows and moss, open doors leading to empty rooms, broken glass and sagging porches. The afternoon was trudging on along toward twilight. The air seemed colder. The woods impenetrable.

Shellburne Thurber has photographed the interiors of abandoned Southern houses. To see some of the pictures, and understand what I was experiencing a bit further, visit here