Time

When I was an ideal (istic) teenager, I would sing Malvinia Reynolds, little boxes, made of ticky-tacky, little boxes on the hillside, and feel superior, and of the generation that would save the world. We were rather rude and offensive.

The generation was good in its beginning, but many lost the way to sloth and, face it, self preservation. Job, car, house, children...It may improve.

I moved here thirty years ago, from a suburb where I lived next door to the farmer who sold his land to the developer who built my house. I loved Gus. He took care of his wife until she died. He moved to Tennessee, to live with a son. I got one post card from him, in pencil, in old man writing: I miss you. Love, Gus. I never wrote back.

When I moved here, I was in the middle of farms, or golf courses that once were farms. And I worked, and paid for a house and a cargo van. When I retired that weaving job I took up as township fiscal officer. I began to pay attention to my township, once farms to its corners, with a tiny village in the middle.

I noticed most the barns. We had cow barns and horse barns. I think more horse barns than cow barns, because there were many gentlemen farmers and summer residents here, with ponies for the children. Between two large industrial cities.

Even as I noticed them, the barns were deteriorating. I began taking pictures, because I knew what was happening. I've posted enough barn pictures to bore every one of you to two deaths; that's not today's purpose.

Today Laura and Kay are out hiking the last trail to earn the staff and badge. When they get back, Laura and I are going to a play at the Weathervane Playhouse. Afterwards, supper somewhere with spaghetti and meatballs.

In the meantime, I went down the road and took a picture of the fate of one of my favorite barns. This barn was in Northampton, annexed by and now part of Cuyahoga Falls, the city creeping up the road.

I don't know Northampton's history as well as Boston's, so I don't know the farm. I do know it became a clay pigeon range, and that development was stalled for about ten years of picture taking while the soil was remediated from lead shot.

People must have somewhere to live, I remind myself often. The Preserve at Salt Creek. Now, that is ostentatious, unless they're accounting for all the saltpeter in the soil.