5-14-2023 Abandoned

 

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Abandoned

Carrie Keiser

The old house has sat in this field for so many years now and seen countless seasons come and go, the sun beating down and weathering the boards. One day a woman climbs out of a truck and treks across the field, kneels down and clicks away, moving a little to the left and the to the right, walking around changing the angle of the camera trying to capture the different facets of the old tired building. A gentle breeze blows through the open windows and doors, caressing the old boards and waking the spirit of the home. There’s a slight creek and if you listen carefully you can hear the old house waking up calling out to the photographer. She pauses and looks around as if she can hear the stories flowing out the door onto the porch to rush across the prairie toward her. Like a flash out of the corner of her eye, something just out of sight.  

The woman sits down, leans back against the old house and closes her eyes for just a moment, trying to catch the memories that are there within the walls.  The old house shutters, its been ages since it felt the human touch, it longs to release the stories: gentle footsteps, laughter and tears that have taken place within its walls. 

The photographer drifts off and into her mind comes a quiet voice…

“Hello, lady! Let me tell you of my family.” Unconsciously, the photographer nods her head and settles in to hear the story. Into her mind the words flow, “It was the late 1800’s when a man and his wife pulled up in a wagon. Yes automobiles were around but not everyone had them it was quite common for the average family to still travel by wagon and buggy. This small family had very few possessions but the they had quite a load of lumber.  Soon the man had started construction on me, his family’s home.  While he worked hard to build my walls, floors and ceilings, they lived in a tent. I felt myself coming to life with each new board being hammered into place, until one day I felt complete.  The man was happy and gathered his wife in his arms, carried her and she carried their baby across my threshold. 

That was the first time I felt the patter of tiny feet and heard the laughter of the family that built me. 

The photographer felt a hand on her shoulder shaking her out of the dream, her husband had gotten tired of waiting for her to return to the truck. As her eyes fluttered open she lost the connection to the house. A slow smile spread across her face and she gently patted the outside wall of the house as she turned to join her husband in walking back to their truck.  As she closed the truck door, she turned to the man next to her and said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if these walls could talk? Tell us the stories of the people who lived here?” He reached for her hand and replied, “It would be quite a story I’m sure,” he put the pickup in drive and pulled away from the tired old house and its stories.

The Old Mauer House

Flynn Family Story Slingers

14 May 2023

By Cary Holmquist

When I was growing up on a farm in the Greenfields Irrigation Projects’ area known as the Crowe Bench in the 1960s, kids had a good deal of freedom to roam around for miles from home without much notice from adults.  The grown-ups were preoccupied with the details of making a living on the farm and in the home and kids were often left on their own to find things to do after their assigned chores were done—and the younger a kid was, the less qualified to he was to do complicated and time-consuming tasks.

This left many long hours for kids to just go exploring our environment, especially in the summer, when the days and daylight around home were longer.  So we roamed the gravel roads along which we could pump our fat-tire bicycles, or rode bareback on the old nag horses we could capture or most often just take off on hikes along canal banks.  Adults did not seem to care or notice.  Trespassing was an unknown restriction, since no one seemed to care or see what we were doing—we seemed to know how to avoid tractors and trucks at work in the fields.  We were just gone “outside to play,” which we were told repeatedly to do by exasperated moms and dads or grandparents.

Thus our wandering with my siblings (two sisters and two brothers) and an uncle only a few years older than me, took us down the hill along the road across the bridge of lower canal to a long-abandoned wood-frame house at the corner of the dusty county-line road and 7th Lane.  The old Mauer House, as we called it, was surrounded by some old shelter-belt Siberian elm trees, Russian olive trees and golden willows and a few tall but struggling lilac bushes.  Beyond the trees the house was surrounded by low-cut alfalfa hay fields stretching across each of the four corners of the road intersection.

The old house was entirely abandoned.  The nearest farm house was more than a half-mile away, that of the owner of the property, “Old Man” Mauer, the son of German immigrants and his wife, their children long-ago grown and moved away.  Old Man Mauer, seen mostly from a distance, always wore striped overalls and a matching railroad engineers hat.  

We would easily crawl over the broken down barbed-wire fence along the roadside and venture to the house, which had no hint of paint on the outside walls.  We could easily see inside the windows were devoid of any glass and the door was usually ajar because it barely hung on hinges.  Well, that is the door that we used, which led into what seemed to be the kitchen, given the old cabinets and counters along the walls.  The other door was permanently closed at the other other end of the house. 

The paint on the inside was peeling off and gave an odd faint smell of age and deterioration.  Here and there bits of peeling wall paper stuck to a few walls, designs faint and random.  

We were mostly interested in some rooms up the creaking old stairs, which held a bit of a view out the small windows and odd bits of old boxes and broken furniture.  In a downstairs room an old closet held a small pile of National Geographic magazines from the 1940s and 1950s, which were somehow spared from mice, flies and changing weather.  

That was the main attraction for me.  Seeing the old photos and colorized paintings of dinosaurs and fish and other exotic scenes of places and people.  I would leaf through them with casual speculations about what it could all mean with my siblings—we only occasionally slowed our page-turning to read captions or titles—never the dense text of the articles.  

I often wondered who left these magnificent magazines behind and why.  And how long it had been since anyone lived there.  Adults would not say, perhaps because they had no more access to the answers than we kids had.  No letters or other other identifying information were found.  If I remember correctly, there might have been a random Life magazine or Reader’s Digest strewn about, but they were in much worse shape and never complete—just shreds of paper.

We played out all kinds of scenes through the rooms on our visits there.   Sometimes pirates sometimes repeated dramas we had seen on television, mostly soap operas our Mom and grandmothers casually viewed as they went about cleaning, cooking, ironing and other household chores.  Sometimes other dramas from westerns or even war stories that were prevalent on television in the 1960s.  And, of course, cops and robbers—bang-bang and threats and much running about and some childish wrestling.

As I recall, the house had no signs of indoor plumbing—no sinks or a bathroom—an old broken apart outhouse lay in a small pile of wooden siding several steps away from the kitchen door.   

Many years later, I learned from my Grandma Vance, that when the house was newer in the early 1930s, it was a home to some relatives, my Grandpa Vance’s brother Heber and his wife Nixola and probably one or two of their daughters, while they farmed the surrounding acres.  Evidently they were there only a few years before they relocated, eventually many miles to the west of Fairfield onto an irrigated farm where they raised cattle and feed and probably a few sheep.  I knew them pretty well as they often visited my grandparents, who lived just a couple of miles away and my parents would go help with branding and such at their ranch.  

However, they were not the original owners, who were probably much earlier settlers, who probably started the place as a dryland farm, before the irrigation project brought canals and water, which was in the early 1920s.  Nor did my grandparents divulge what happened to the house after the Vances moved away to their much larger farm to the west.  

By the 1960s, when we roamed around the place, it had been abandoned for many years—probably at least 20 years.  And somehow managed to weather the harsh winters, constant wind, largely protected by the old shelter-belt trees that surrounded the house.  Bits and pieces of it were probably hauled away by who-knows-who, though it did not seem to suffer from overt vandalism—so no fires or walls knocked down.  

However, years after I lost interest in the childhood imagination about the place, the farm owners leased it to neighbors who improved the surrounding fence and filled the acres with beef cattle.  These reckless bovines would find their way into the house and knocked down walls and punched holes in the flooring and gnawed on the surrounding trees.  So the place became more and more dilapidated than ever.  I don’t believe all the haphazard manure was very welcoming to any other exploring youngsters.  And so, except for the roving cattle, it has been an even lonelier place than before.

But every time I see an old National Geographic magazine, with its signature yellow boarder around the black and white table-of-contents front cover, I am instantly transported back to the old Mauer house, where we discovered the world in pages old, scenic and abandoned. 

Layla Tabor

Adventure Essay

This is my not happy but happy adventure to Michigan with my Gramma. It has bad bits, good bits, in-betweens and a cute baby. Ba ba baaaaaaa!

First my Gramma had to go get my cousins out in Michigan, and she asked me to come with her, so I did.

Then we went on a plane. The first plane ride was fine. Then when we got to the first airport got some lunch. After that we got on the last plane we had to ride. Then at the very end, I threw up, which was disgusting. At the last airport my Aunt Vanessa came to pick us up in Detroit. By the way, that's where the airport is. 

When we got to their house I played with my cousin, Freyja. Then I fed my cousin, Elowen, the cute baby. By the way, Elowen is the baby in this story.  Then we had dinner which was meat and rice. After that we went to sleep.

That night I threw up. So then I washed my hand and watched Miraculous on Gramma's I-pad. 

Then in the morning we started to go home, but Aunt Vanessa's GPS tried to take us to a water taxi which was too expensive. Then we got to the first hotel, but pets weren't allowed, and Aunt Vanessa brought her small black dog with us. So we sneaked her in the hotel.

That night I couldn't go to sleep so we went down the hall and talked to mom on the phone. I said I wanted some stories to listen to so mom recorded some books for me. Some other people in my family recorded some as well and mom gave us some that she already had that Gramma recorded. eventually I fell asleep.

Then in the morning we set off, and we got to a hotel that allowed pets which was good.

That night I went to sleep with the stories and some new ones like The Princess in Black. My dad read that one.

In the morning we got some breakfast at the cafeteria and someone gave me and Freyja a quarter each. Then we drove to my Grand-Aunt Carrie's house. Then went to bed.

In the morning we went to Gramma's house, but I left my water bottle at Aunt Carrie's house. Once we got to Gramma's house we waited for my mom to pick me up. When my mom came and picked me up, I didn't want to leave. But the lucky thing is that they were coming to our house in the end!