It's a Small World After All

No, not that small world. Just the thought of our trip to Disney World 22 years ago is enough to send chills down my spine. Just the thought of that horrific ride with it's insidious little dolls singing that horrible ear worm is enough to make me seriously ill. No, not that small world.

I'm talking about the fact that occasionally we are reminded of how closely we can be connected. Think the 7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon with 6 degrees removed.

Remember, I live in a very, very small community of only 750 people. Twenty to thirty years ago the number would only have been about 100 people.

Unbelievably enough, one of those 100 people is married to my Grammar Nazi Paula! Now that's a very small world. I'd love for a statistician to figure the odds on that happening.

As an adult her husband has been living in Idaho, but as a child he lived on a farm only 1.2 miles from my home as the crow flies.



Soon after Paula surfed to my blog she figured out that I was living in her husband's childhood farming community. She told me the name of the road and I knew there were only three farms on that road.

It didn't take much of a sleuth to figure out which farm was his because two of the homes were fairly new. There was also a ghost site where a farmhouse and barn had once stood.

I drove down the road with my camera in hand, hoping that his old home wasn't the ghost site. I took the above photo and sent it off to Paula.

Yes, this was his boyhood home. He remembers watching lightning storms from that porch. It would have been the perfect spot. This farmhouse stands on a rise in the landscape, looking south over hundreds of acres of open farmland. The perfect spot for storm watching and making memories.

There's a nice barn behind the house and I'll bet that he had chores in that barn. Maybe they had some dairy cows, which require milking twice a day, once in the morning and again in the evening. His family probably grew corn and soybeans which are still the main crops in this area.

It's still a lovely farm and I'm very sad that things are poised to change drastically. If you stand on that porch today you'd look out over some cornfields that will, in the next few years, be transformed into subdivisions with large home and townhomes.

This is a scene that is playing out not only in our area but across the country and around the world. In my three years of publishing my photoblog which records the decay of our old farmhouses and barns, I've received e-mails from all over the world telling me about family farms abandoned and falling into decay. Centuries old farmhouses and outbuildings are crumbling with no thought to preservation or repurposing. So, again we are connected, sometimes by our common experiences.

I am glad to know that this childhood home is safe, at least for now.