Down Country Paths. #6

Good morning everyone! It is a sunny and very smoky morning here again. It is only mid morning and already my eyes are bothering me from all this smoke. Oh well, these things happen. Moving. Hmm, let me see, there are 26 days before I move. No, I have not started to pack yet. I should. Usually once I know that I will be moving, I start packing.

Usually I have at least 2 months notice before moving. Not this time. So, I should be packing. I have a lot of stuff to pack. Right now I am trying to figure out where to put the boxes once they are packed. This apartment is tiny. So right now I am just planning things so I know the order in which to pack. My posting might be a bit erratic over the next few weeks, but please stick around, it will get back to normal.

This female Ruby-throated Hummingbird was sitting deep in a shrub out back here, I did not think the pic would turn out since it was quite dark back in there.

Or perhaps a new normal. Now, what to share this morning from my journals. Let me see. How about this one? It was a sunny and rather smoky day back then as well. I went driving down one of our back roads which was gravel, but remarkably smooth. Except in a few places. Sigh.

I was driving slowly anyway looking for…whatever. Something interesting. Something out of the ordinary. Suddenly I stopped and backed up a bit. From this spot I was higher than the surrounding landscape and it looked like the roof of a house down among some trees. I found a spot where I could park the car off the road. Okay, I made a spot, same thing though.

Too bad I did not have a nice path to walk on.

There was no sign of a road into that house, if that is what it was. There was a field beyond the roof that I saw. So I began walking in to see what I could find. Soon I was standing next to an abandoned house. It had obviously been abandoned for a long time, it was really falling apart. But the roof was still in place, mostly. Sort of. I looked in one of the broken windows.

Not much inside. There was a large kitchen, a living room and a bedroom which still had a very old iron bed frame in it. Nothing else. The living room was empty except for a very beat up arm chair sitting in one corner. There was a table and a couple of broken chairs in the kitchen. There was also a large, and very active, wasp hive attached to the kitchen cupboards.

Bumble bees were living under the house.

That was also right next to the door. The other door opened into the living room, but there was no floor at that location, just a big hole which was likely the cellar. The house sat on large wood beams and on one was carved “Builded 1920”. I did brave it and go inside the kitchen, the floor was leaning toward that big hole in the ground.

There was a calendar nailed onto the wall which was from 1955, likely the year people left this house. There are a lot of similar places around the area that were abandoned in the 1950s. My one foot broke through the floor at one point which scared up a bunch of bees. So I removed myself speedily and went back outside. There was a lot of scrap metal and smaller farm items scattered around the house.

There were rather large spiders in that house too.

I picked up one bar that I thought might be a handy item and carried it around with me while checking around the yard. Good thing too. I found the well. By falling into it. The old wood cover was too rotten to hold me. But that bar fit nicely across the mouth of the well which kept me from falling in.

There was water in that well, but it was deeper. I did not want to find out just how deep the water was however. But I was able to lift myself out quite easily using that bar. Always a good thing to have when exploring abandoned places like this. Sometimes wells are not even covered, but with the long grass around these places, it is easy to fall in.

And you do not want to do that. Especially if you are alone. Like I was. After that I decided to leave and I never went back. There were other places I visited that were more interesting and we will look at those another time. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and God bless!

Steve and Muffin.

©2023 Steve McLeod.