life:: sometimes you just can’t go home
Sometimes revisiting your old stomping grounds can just make you sad.
Recently, Frankie had to go home to Ohio for a funeral and like every time we go home, he stopped by to see our old house. We lived there for a very long time and it was our safe place, our hideaway in the woods, our place to find peace from the chaos of the world. We lived in Shawnee State Forest in the foothills to the Appalachian Mountains and it was a haven for too many reasons for me to blather on and on about. Suffice it to say, it was where we healed from very traumatic events in both our lives and became the best of friends and learned to move forward. ‘Nuff said there.
Our beautiful 20 acres was bought by an entrepeneur who saw the potential we always had, but he had the money to make it happen. He turned our corner of the world into a beautiful wedding garden and reception hall and threw outrageously fabulous weddings. FYI, we got married in our front yard 10 years previous to that, and the photo ops were stunning.
Our old farmhouse always stayed as the caretaker’s home behind the scenes.
Fast forward 10 more years later, and the entrepeneur lost his millions in the Great Recession a few years ago and now has all but abandoned the business. Our old property is on the market again for many 100’s of thousands of dollars more than we sold it for back in 2002. Although we would love to buy it back, we are love rich and cash poor.
So back to his stop there last month…
He took gobs of photos, but they are so incredibly sad. The old place is no longer as we remember it…overgrown…falling apart…totally neglected.
I went through all the photos over and over and decided to only keep the not-so-sad…the ones that can still remind me of home.
~from this angle it’s not quite so bad, and my Granma Amy’s snowball bush is in the foreground and flourishing~
~and my ‘loveseat’ rock that Frankie hoisted up & out of the creek to sit and contemplate life, while extremely overgrown, is still there on the creek bank~
