Waxing Nostalgic

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Between my new kudzu header, courtesy of Lil Toni, and her new blog featuring an old antebellum home, I started noodling over some of the old houses of memory.

The first old plantation home I remember seeing and having a sad feeling about was about 5 or 6 miles SW of Braselton, Georgia. We used to go quail hunting in the overgrown fields surrounding it.

My dad loved to quail hunt. Well, I guess he probably loved hunting of all kinds. I can remember the second house I ever lived in. It was the house my paternal grand parents moved out of about the time I was a year old. We had been living in another house on the original Dunagan's Dairy Farm behind Alcovy Baptist church. We moved after my grandparents moved into the house they built up on the hill.

Mom and Dad had a fenced lot beside the house where the garden was tended. The hunting dogs pen was there as well as a chicken coop. I can remember that dad would fatten up and clean out the digestive system of the opossums he'd catch. There was a place to keep the snapping turtles, feeding them on milk soaked cornbread, he'd trap on the creeks and rivers close by. We might have been poor as far as money went but we feasted on the bounty of nature. I can't imagine what it must be like to know hunger. We live and lived in a nation of plenty........it's just that sometimes you had to go out and hunt it down.

Back to the old plantation house. As I said it was not far from Braselton, Ga, the town that later Kim Bassinger bought at the urging of her realtor brother-in-law, and later had to bankrupt on. (I doubt that he had to give back any of the commission.)

This old place was about a half mile off the paved road, and had been abandoned for long enough for it to start falling down around it's self. What had once been a large rambling two story wooden structure with a huge balcony across the whole of the front, had the porch collapsed and holes in the roof, the windows were all broken and the doors were ajar, looking like an old bleached skull, wondering where the rest of itself was. The grounds were all overgrown with kudzu which had begun to creep over the roof line, determined to hide the ugliness like a once great beauty drawing her shawl close about so you can only see glimpses of what used to be.

Many, many are the ruins of what once were dreams of young, strong builders of this country. Farmers whose children went to where the paychecks were regular and sure. Who had a fondness for the old home but neither the money or desire, or ability to keep something tax collectors were determined should not be passed down to future generations.

I've seen buildings in Germany which have been pretty much continuously lived in for a thousand years or more. Lived in, loved in, repaired, updated, housing generations of people from birth to death, they are sanctuaries for their occupants, except for the occasional war here or there.

We have many two, three, a few even four hundred year old year old structures, many of them designated historical landmarks. But for the most part, whats old gets discarded, bulldozed into oblivion, then paved or concreted over.

The natural order you may say. Perhaps? But I wonder if we're leaving a part of our soul behind in order to have the latest and newest?