ABANDONED

Abandoned House, Crocheron, Maryland

On my occasional jaunts to a remote peninsula of Maryland's Eastern Shore, I am always fascinated by the abandoned houses I discover.  Often, I stop and poke around these old places—as I did recently with the house in this photo—hoping to find clues to what kind of people lived there, how they lived, and what caused them to suddenly abandon the place they once called home.  As the poet Ted Kooser reminds us in the poem below, abandoned houses have stories to tell us, not only about their prior inhabitants, but also about the transient nature of our own lives.

ABANDONED FARMHOUSE

by Ted Kooser

                                 He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

                                 on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

                                 a tall man too, says the length of the bed 

                                 in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

                                 says the Bible with a broken back

                                 on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

                                 but not a man for farming, say the fields

                                 cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

                                A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

                                papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

                                covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

                                says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

                                Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

                                and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

                                And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

                                It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

                                Something went wrong, says the empty house

                                in the weed-choked yard.  Stones in the fields

                                say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

                                in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

                                And the child?  Its toys are strewn in the yard

                                like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,

                                a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

                                a doll in overalls.  Something went wrong, they say.

Note:  Ted Kooser served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress between 2004 and 2006.  During his second term, he also won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).