Someone Else's Home

A house that once was, Illinois

The most difficult experience of going home to the source of one's beginning is realizing just how much home has changed. Where and when my life began was now someone else's home.

Traveling and living away from the hometown area meant that returning was more of a sadness. It seemed to me that while I have changed drastically, those places should have remained the same as if under a big glass dome, frozen in time.  The people I knew then should be the same ages, moving around the county while continuing those same bits of their lives as if I had never left.

In America farmland, houses and barns are made of wood, well made. They were homes for maybe three generations and then no longer occupied. The photos below are of those in Illinois, my home state. 

Family farms disappeared when cities held more jobs. Children who grew up in those farms moved away, leaving the houses empty. Empty houses fell down. Towns once busy and thriving failed when elderly died and their progeny traveled on.

It is inevitable that lives change, people find other opportunities. That would be me. But, in the places of those farms and homes, there are new homes and barns, just down the road. Their story is yet to be written.

Pike County, Illinois Courthouse. Stone masons had recently moved from England and settled in the county. Their skill built this building.

1895

1953

2019

Things change, but then things remain the same.