A wee wander down the lanes? As you know I am in central Illinois. It is flat here.. VERY flat. When you live on such flat plains, geometric shapes become more and more apparent.
Do you see what I mean?
And when we see a nice round bin it becomes almost restful to the eye.
Coming out of our lane I turned South. I have never tested how far I could drive in a straight line (I don’t have hours and hours to spare) but it is a very, very long way.
The wind came up yesterday. Strong winds, not too cold though. Just Mother Wind giving me a little slapping about the head. You have been too relaxed girl, she is saying. Wake up!
As soon as all this is in the can. Winter is coming.
Anyway, a while ago I said there were no wild unkempt areas around here but I found a few very close who have called me a liar. (No wild blackberries though.) This is the old service station at Three Mile Corner. I drive past it all the time. It is slowly being sipped and whispered into oblivion by the vines and trees.
I love decay. It has a special place in my record keeping. The Matriarch said that when she was a very young girl, wearing a navy coat with a white collar, her uncle and she would come down here on the weekend to eat breakfast as a treat.
As you know out here on the flat prairies the roads have been designed in unrelenting squares, each road is dead straight, each block is a mile square, a perfectly mapped grid. (If I was God I would be tempted to reach down my hand and muss it up a little!! Thankfully I am not God as the pressure would be enormous!) Anyway, many, many years ago, every two miles there was a little school. I know I have told you this before. They were always on a corner.
Most of them have been torn down now. But this one is about a mile and a half from our house. Forlorn and decaying, I document it every few months. It is one of my favourite places to go. Beautiful wide board pine floor! Huge East facing windows. Education is centralised now, little schools are scorned and anyway there are not enough kids anymore. I was told by an old man that each of these schools, two miles apart, taught a multi-level twenty or so kids. TWENTY! That is a lot of children in a room as big as your lounge. My pathetic maths tell me that is about a hundred school age kids in a two mile radius. Imagine the noise! What a booming area. Not wealthy, the farms were to feed the families, not much of anything to call their own for sure but fertile and alive and noisy.
The Matriarch’s mother was one of the teachers in one of these little one room schools. In fact she rented a bedroom from The Old Codgers mother so she could be close to the school she was working in. (Which in the present day was 15 minutes drive from her own home which is still standing and can be seen when I take those shots across the ditch.) Fascinating isn’t it. Did she ride a bike to school from the Old Codgers house? I think she may have but what about when it was freezing cold. I need to find out. I must ask him. I have many of her old readers and primers in my book case. This area used to be heaving with people. Piles of teachers, (no headmasters) and stores and farms and houses with barns. It fascinates me. Where have you all gone? Where have all your houses gone. Who were you?
But enough of the questions, I shall ask the old people for the answers. Everyone needs an old person. And then home for a drink. Why have one water container when four is better.
I hope you all have a lovely day.
Your friend on the farm, celi
ps, The laundry and kitchen drains are still Not draining, (grey water reigns supreme) my toilet is still not flushing, (Don’t go there – I have a back up in the Coupe) the fridge is still leaking, the big wind today turned the chicken ark/ hoop house into a kite! The mouse smell cannot be tracked down to a rotting mouse body but I have sniffed it to a WALL, A WALL – so I am going to invest in some aromatic candles which may or may not make it better, chickens are still escaping from the chook house during the laying hours, the gates are still tied up with string, Sheila, the Hereford Pig, who is so tall now she almost reaches past my hip and I am 5’8″, has been given the run of the place, (she asked so sweetly), I love that pig, the little piggies have black snouts from eating walnuts and the little Marmalade Cat is getting more confident and was caught playing with Boo today (not a good idea – the weight thing) but Playing. I had to smile. And I picked a bushel of the most enormous pears. Life is good.
c
The Kitchen's Garden 
68 responses to “Shall we go for a drive? Just around a couple of blocks.”
p.s. I haven’t a clue as to how to get a mouse out of a wall! Haven’t had to deal with that yet. My in-laws house in quite old and they sometimes have a mouse problem in their basement. Ours is newer, but one did get in one of the cars and chewed up Kevin’s fur trapper hat!
He was not happy! LOL
I knw that he puts rat poison in the trucks for the winter. Or mice will get in and do some damage to the interior. I suppose you do the same. Good luck! It seems sometimes when it rains it pours eh?
😦
Can’t use rat poison if you have pets that wander. Outdoors is worse, what eats the poison and dies is eaten by something else and so on – a trail of toxins.
Yes. That is true…ours are housed in the winter. They don’t go out. Too cold here. We live on the tundra! 😉
We house everything here in the winter. And Kevin is very careful and responsible with chemicals. Our farm is immaculate! Everything in it’s place! Nothing lying around. 🙂 For such a large place it is very neat and tidy and organized!
Oh, boy! An outing! I enjoy your photos and seeing your world. The picture of the water containers and Boo is a great composition. I could look at it for hours. An ark kite is not a good thing.
No, not too good, i am going to have to rethink it! c
How about an anchor! Like on a boat!!! I think like a sailor still! LOL It is not a bad idea! 🙂
Wonderful photos today C. of the “beautiful”, old buildings being slowly reclaimed by nature…or claimed by nature I should say! Sad and wonderful stories these buildings have to tell us. Does the Matriarch remember if she walked to her teaching job from the Old Codgers mum’s home?
Wide oak plank flooring?? Just deteriorating? Would they not let you or someone salvage those materials somehow? Wouldn’t it be nice if something could be saved of that old school?
I bet that drying corn sounds like old bones rattling in the wind! 🙂 Spooky, just in time for Halloween!
Yes she did walk and then she had another job a few years after and took the horse and trap, picking up kids on the way, isn’t that lovely.. Weirdly I can’t find out who owns it now, it was sold to a developer, this is all i can find out..but I go in anyway.. c
oh oh…urban sprawl? 😦
I love the blue sky and the golden field of cut corn – if you squint your eyes, it does look like a distant sea and sand-scape.
Just this week I’ve been considering that half a lifetime has passed and brought me to the same quiet desperation to get back to the country as I had to get out of it. Times have changed, distance doesn’t take as long and technology in some ways renders it almost irrelevant..Maybe the trends will reverse.
Much as I mourn the passing of the corner school lifestyle, it’s good to see nature using the corners for its own purpose. As a species we are very good at monument building but we don’t have the stamina of Mother Nature.
I think it is reversing. You still have half a lifetime to get back to the country, time to get noisily desperate, I do hope you can get some time sitting on a piece of land. I know you were hoping to drive around the country? Am I right in remembering that? c
Your remembering is right… the great Australian dreams… a quarter acre block, and to see the country, slowly. We have much in place and are getting there, we can see the tunnel, and a glimmer of light.
I think it’s reversing too, country areas are realizing they have much to offer.
It was funny to have that particular aha moment, plotting and planning I thought, I so wanted to get away now I want to get back, but city life has served me well in the meantime 🙂
Good to have a tunnel and it’s little light in sight! c
I know the smell of a mouse in the wall! Been there…and lit the candles! I loved the photos, Celi. I have never been to any spot on earth with a well-qualified prairie, and it’s one thing I desperately want to experience . It’s unique in ways that sing to me! And maybe 15 years ago we tracked down my grandmother’s definitely decaying one room school house in rural Mississippi, walking in an out of crumbling doorways and a collapsed roof. Dangerous, but we just couldn’t help ourselves. It was the most wonderful day. Your photos took me back to that, and I’m smiling. ox
I would have gone in too, a little danger is a good thing!… c
Oooo a day out and a wander. love that you are capturing what goes on around you. I wonder how long it takes nature to reclaim those buildings. and yes I love decay too – mostly for the stories to be told
Some block – and lots of room for thought!
If you really analyse it, that ‘better life’ with the education is a delusion.
I think hard workers get where they want to be, education or not.. c
Great tour, Celi. I didn’t realize that many schools dotted the countryside. I’ve seen them along the back roads of Michigan but, today, there aren’t many left. A number of years ago, there was an old farmer who, like your friend Codger friend, had been raised in the area and was the source for all kinds of history facts. He’s gone now and there’s no one to take his place, I’m afraid. Sheilah is hip-high? I’d no idea she’s grown that large. That’s a lotta pig to follow you around the farmy. Have a great evening!
She is very tall but also very well behaved, not pushy at all, i would lose if she was! c
Methinks that list I advised you to make of all the major ‘chores’ to do is well and truly turning in circles in your head! Loved the post and learned a lot. We are all individuals and ‘vive la difference’ but I too have lived all my life amongst hill and dale, always surrounded by trees and bushes as far as I could see. And preferably near water 🙂 . Methinks I would be somewhat out of my personal comfort zone on total flatlands Like my ‘horizons’ closer!!
Morning Eha, glad to see you still here, hopefully still at home. My friends in sydney say they can smell and see the smoke in the air down there.. c
Home until tomorrow and longer if our wonderful firies continue with their miracles! But have never prayed so hard: the containment line is within walking distance!! A 40 km fire definitely is NO joke!! Sydney Basin actually has worse air than we do up here: health rating down, down, down and will be for a week at least . . .
I will keep in touch..quite terrifying.. c
And what a lovely drive it was.
Celi, a beautiful post, and so much sadness for the changing times in it too… all the comments amazing too..So many things are changing… even the books children read, and the songs they sing , and the food they eat !!!
What a fascinating piece of history, hearing about the connections that go way way back!
As for the mouse: once in my old villa in Mt Eden, a possom died in the walls. There was nothing to do but sit it out, and burn lots of fragrance -essential oils in a burner. Eventually the smell did subside.
I just love that first photo with the hay, amazing composition! Sorry to hear that your issues haven’t been resolved, not a good time to have to use an outdoor toilet.
For the dead mouse odour, have you considered a Lamp Berger (or home made version)? They are said to be able to clean the air. I bought a very simple, inexpensive starter kit ($40) and then googled how to make my own fuel which is simply 99% isopropyl alcohol and a few drops if essential oils if you want fragrance. But just burning the alcohol cleans the air. http://www.lampeberger.ca. Hospitals used this air cleaning method in France about 100 years ago.
Thank you so much for the little trip – I find it fascinating to “place” people. But my don’t things change over time? It’s good to have a photographic record of the decay of the buildings and still be able to talk with people who knew it when it thrived. How long I wonder before they disappear completely from life and memory.
You sounds happy and peaceful, that’s so good. And could the wall be damp perhaps from the outside (sorry, am a bit obsessed with damp right now as am dealing with a Victorian house that has some damp walls!)..it can be quite stinky 😦