As long as I’ve lived in the country, I’ve driven past this old farmhouse, it has been long abandoned and allowed to decay, the backside of it was open to the sun and the wind. A few weeks ago, I saw some workmen up on the roof, I assumed they were fixing it, I assumed someone was restoring this beautiful and forgotten old thing – built somewhere around 1800.

I even stopped to congratulate them for restoring it, and they all smiled and nodded at me. Day by day, I see that I was wrong, and some neighbors tell me the old farmhouse is being taken apart bit by bit and shipped out to the Northwest, where they have no old farmhouse generally, to be re-assembled.

I suppose that is a pretty good fate for an abandoned farmhouse, yet I can’t help but see the house as a symbol of the abandonment of rural life by the people who run the country and plan for the economy. Small towns like mine were booming a century ago, most struggle now to keep their children around and find work for people to do. Profits soar in the new global economy, but many people do not fare so well.

I am happy this old farmhouse is being reborn, sorry I won’t see it or too many like it any more. It is curious, watching it vanish a bit more each day, it seems to be telling its own story, and I will probably never know how it ends. I love living in the country, I love the values that still persist and thrive in rural life – a sense of community, of minding one’s own business, of knowing who you are dealing with, of seeing people rush instinctively to the aid of one another.

The old farmhouses are vanishing, the old values hang on, perhaps waiting for a time when we will be discovered again, our world filled with the farmhouses of the future.