This house was built in the 1950’s.  The street it is on was here long before the developement that rose behind it and the strip malls and gas stations that turned the highway from a lonely two lane road into a major thoroughfare.  The inside is newer then the out, but if you look closely in the corners and in the cracks along the baseboards you can see the ghosts of what was. No moviestar would have ever walked these floors, they were built for a workingman and his wife. 

At some point we gave up on farmland, paved the fields and built communities, cookie cutter houses almost stacked on top of one another. Many people came rushing in, good people looking for an escape from Baltimore and it’s surrounding neighborhoods, good people looking to let their kids grow up in a world that had slowly faded on. The rolling pastures, old oak trees, quite streams and animals hidden beneath were gone; that is the irony, the idyllic landscape they came to find had to be destroyed so they could build a home. 

If you listen you can hear voices on the wind, they speak of angels and farmers, retelling the stories their parents but whispered by candlelight behind the barn. Or inside a kitchen thats life flowed and filled the cold of bedrooms where they struggled to find sleep.  Life was hard, that gets lost in the image the pilgrims imagined, and the land was only willing to provide by sweat and tears. 

I came here for the same reasons as most but decided to stake my claim in what was old.  It was not to turn back time but rather to respect the desire to build something that lasts. Progress has given us a nice place to live and covered up the truth of the past.  In this house I find some semblence of a past I never lived, one my grandparents aspired to but is a foreign and fancied.