broken pieces

Until I was ten, we lived in an old farmhouse that was built in 1830 or thereabouts. The house was cool and all (having been a converted and unconverted two family house that allowed me a play space in the former kitchen on the second floor). But the nirvana to my childhood imagination was the surrounding woods that bordered half of our house. I built and maintained a ‘fort’ in those woods, creating rooms and paths, and furnishing it with the plentiful supply of ruins from the weed and sapling covered mounds behind the treeline of our backyard. 

Those ruins were mostly pieces of terra cotta pots that scattered about the woods fifty years before when the barn that went with our house collapsed in the Hurricane of 1938. It was long before my time – before my parents’ time. Before, even, most of Holden even existed. So maybe that was it. My own mini archeological dig on Shrewsbury Street… that mostly yielded those fragments of terra cotta. But once there was a spoon. Some rusty batteries (most definitely toxic). A corner frame with hinges suggesting a door that actually became a wall of one of my rooms. And… the most prized trophy… a rusty emblem from a gun powder barrel.

I think I even called that pile of rubble treasure island… or something like that. Because that was what it was to me… a buried treasure.

There are lots of rubble piles in this state now. I don’t think I can romanticize them into the idea of treasure without the veneer of my childhood imagination and the comprehension of all that is devastated. And I don’t even think I completely understand the devastation. Just that something that was once whole is a bunch of scattered pieces due to Mother Nature’s angry fury.

They never rebuilt that barn… and just now as I recount this story I recognize the fact that 1938 was still the Great Depression, when that farmhouse was a multi-family. So I doubt the farm was a viable source of income and the hurricane eliminated a maintenance expense. I was too young to ask those questions when we lived there… and I’m not even sure the answers were available.

But it does make me wonder how many homes will be rebuilt? How many people can afford it? How much stuff is lost forever to the neglect of time and weeds growing over it… waiting for a precocious child to unearth a half century from now?