Abandoned farmhouse on an empty road

Take a look inside
Empey Hill, ON
January 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

There was a lot to see during the 6 minutes I spent parked beside a nearly empty country road in the shadow of a clearly empty country church*. This seemingly abandoned farm building was what caught my eye in the first place, a slowly decaying snapshot of a once-vibrant rural-agricultural life, now slowly giving way to modern reality in a spate of For Sale signs.

Whoever built this place so long ago seems to have built it to last. Someone cared, and I feel a small shot of warmth amid the bone-chilling cold as I think about how I'm now connected to someone from an earlier generation whose work has now rippled out to me. It's a tenuous connection, of course, but any connections these days are worth holding onto.

As I move through my mental shot list before losing feeling in my fingers, I think about who would have used this building, where they are now, and why they left. I wish I could see what this place, this community, was like in its heyday. I wish time didn't always have to gradually erase the people, frameworks, and moments we hold most dear.

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* See here for more.