BEAUTIFUL THINGS
When I was seven we moved from town to a crumbling farmhouse surrounded by fields gone wild and outbuildings clotted with brambles and vines. There was a half-burned bank barn, with arrow slits in the wall that had once provided ventilation; a smokehouse with a rotting door and a litter of stray kittens under the eaves; a two-story wagon shed with a long narrow corncrib and stalls that had once housed farm animals but were now strewn with old bottles, blankets, and twisted heaps of scrap metal and wire. Best of all, across the train tracks that ran behind the back of our property was a deserted cabin, with blackened boards and broken windows, a place that provoked in me equal amounts of terror and longing, for being both so familiar and strange.
The eerie photographs in “Time Wearing Out Memory“—images of the abandoned buildings in Schoharie County, “the oldest continually farmed county in New York,” according to the book jacket—give me the same feeling. Joyce Carol Oates writes of this fear and fascination in her essay “They All Just Went Away,” which appeared in the magazine in 1995:
Where a house has been abandoned—unworthy of being sold to new tenants, very likely seized by the county for default on taxes and the property held in escrow—you can be sure there has been a sad story. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of pityingly. How they went wrong. Why did she marry him, why did she stay with him? Just desperate people. Ignorant. Poor white trash. Runs in the family. A wrong turn.
—Andrea Walker
