The Rise and Demise

I went home to the bluegrass state recently. As always, I am pleased by its natural beauty. The Kentucky hills reaching to the sky with lush pastures and creeks at their bases. Rock outcroppings that weep with little streams of water that begin their journey somewhere in the peaks. The pastures are often a quilted pattern of cattle and horses grazing happily on the blue grass. From crossbred to pure bred, painted horses and Thoroughbreds, it is mostly a picture of agricultural bounty wrapped in wooden fences and dotted with magnificent barns.

As we made our way through old familiar roads however, I was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find half million dollar houses on land that was not so long ago occupied by rusty-roofed wooden sheds and contented livestock. Where twenty acre pastures fed family herds, now five houses of masonry splendor and four car garages have cut black ribbon paths across creek and grass to scar the quarter. Progress, or some product of it, has come to disquiet this lovely place. The city has metastasized and is reaching the heart of this particular rural community. Its encroachment is evident by the abandoned farms.

Together houses, sheds and barns that once were full of families and their living, now stand graying and folding with neglect. The metal gone from barn and shed roofs exposes ancient wooden shingles, and where those are missing, solid old beams painstakingly axed and placed by able hands, are now naked to the elements and left to perish. Doors are hanging by a single hinge waiting for one more storm to lay them to rest.

The houses that experienced the laughter, the joys of birth, the pain of death with in their humble walls now set cold, silent and empty. Houses are just structures until they are occupied, its then that they become homes. You can have a fine house with bricks and wood alone, but it takes good people to make a fine home. These were once good farms but now it is only the wind that makes the wooden screen doors slam.

Generations of folks for 180 years or more lived and died on these grounds. Children were raised. Some went off to school, some went to war. Some returned, some never did. There was life here. A farm is a living thing after all. Its’ a cycle of the earth producing sustenance to families, and the giving back in sweat and toil the energy received from the soil, that completes a manner of simple livelihood as old as the human race itself. But at some of the farms I saw before me, only memories remain of the vitality that once was.

I am not against prosperity nor am I un-accepting of change when change is necessary and good. Yet, as our nation becomes more and more crowded, our dependency grows increasingly on fragile things. Farming corporations are becoming the rule in agriculture. Big box store shelves are the main source of food. We place our sedentary lives in the hands of technology and pharmaceuticals in the hopes of staying healthy. Media is the main source of cerebral stimulation. Used to be that days working on the farm kept many folks “healthy wealthy and wise.” For most of America that hasn’t been the case for some time now.

As I watch the life drain from parts of rural America I feel some trepidation and a great sense of loss. The “good old days”, I fully realize, were often hard old days. But they were simple days. Days that built strong people. Strong principles. Strong nations. Strength was gained from the land . Strength which, I am afraid, like the once sturdy buildings and fertile fields I beheld in parts of my beloved home state, is slowly decaying away.