The country was once the heartland, the spirit and heart of the new America and its promise and beauty, its barns and old farmhouses iconic symbols of the past and the future.

The country has been left behind, forgotten and abandoned for money and material things, a broken and bitter but still beautiful place.

We lost a lot when we turned our backs on the country.

I love taking photos of old barns and farmhouses, they deserve to be honored and remembered.

What Frost saw in his poems we can still see, these images and feelings are all around us, and it is my job and purpose to capture them while they are still here.

I am so happy to live in the country, my home now for good, and to share with you Robert Frost’s beautiful poem The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.

“The House had gone to bring again, To the midnight sky a sunset glow

Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame

Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end, For teams that came by the stony road.

To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs

And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air

At broken windows flew out and in. Their murmur ore like the sight we sigh, from too much dwelling on what has bee.

Yet for them, the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the the aged elm, though touched with fire, And the aged elm,

though touched with fire, And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing said.

But though they rejoiced in the next they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.”  

— Robert Frost, The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.