Old houses

This place popped into view on my bike ride this morning.

I have an on-going fascination with deteriorating dwellings and I’m not sure why. Some, like this one on North Taft Hill Road out of Fort Collins, where urban turns to rural in a big hurry, I can visit every so often and watch as the place dissolves slowly into the ground.

The creepy vine-covered, tree-shaded stone house I saw a couple of months ago in upstate New York, I won’t see again. It doesn’t matter where they are, how tiny or enormous, each one captures my imagination and gets me thinking.

Who chose this spot to build on and why?  How long ago? How many years did they stay? Why did they leave? Did they raise a family here? Who owns it now and do they care about its history and its welfare?

The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton is my all-time favorite children’s book. It’s probably responsible for my affection for broken-down, abandoned old houses. A little house built way out in the country becomes surrounded as the city encroaches but stays, abandoned, just where she was built. “This little house shall never be sold for gold or silver,” said the man who built her. “She will live to see our great-great-grandchildren’s great-great grandchildren living in her.”

And so she sits, uncared for, until she is rescued and moved by a descendant of the man who built her, to a hillside way out in the country. She gets repaired and becomes livable again.

I guess I must be imagining the potential in these old houses. Maybe one day someone will come to their rescue, fix them up and make them useful once more.

I’ve always thought it would be fun to scout out a dozen of the most pathetic old houses around, photograph them and create a calendar. Maybe the Board of Realtors would be interested. Housing bargains are hard to come by in these parts.