I got off the train on my 40th birthday in Indianapolis, the city where I was born. Dallas, my best friend since middle school came and picked me up. His mother Sandy had just died and he was staying at her house alone out in the country. We got to the farm very late and had dinner. I ate some meatloaf his mom made and froze before she got sick. Me and Dallas sat at the kitchen table for a long time and talked. We grieved, we talked shop (I am very new to photography and was greatly influenced by Dallas, who has been doing it a lot longer than me), and we told stories about our recent adventures.
I slept in his mom's bed that night, and although I didn't see or hear any ghosts, the darkness and silence in the room had a haunting feeling. The house had been overturned by relatives attempting an estate sale, and eventually most of Sandy's belongings were moved to the barn. The house didn't feel lived in and I knew there was a good chance it never would again. It was like sleeping on the edge of the world.
In the morning Dallas gave me a tour of Sandy's former empire. He showed me the massive, now empty chicken coop, an impressive maze of patchwork fencing, screen doors, and plastic roofing. He showed me the mostly bare, weedy garden and the fruit trees on the edge of the property.
Dallas had been taking care of his mom for about a year. When he got to Indiana his mom's farm was humming along. Sandy built her own house, designing it to be as small as county building codes would allow. She had over 100 chickens, a pig, a mule, a plentiful garden, and a freezer full of preserves. She traded eggs and vegetables with neighbors for milk and other supplies. Eventually she bought the barn across the street and painted colorful murals on the outside. She had built everything herself over the course of a decade, all while working a full time job at a chain hardware store. She was close to retirement when she got sick.
Dallas had a lot of anguish about the fate of his mom's legacy. He was worried that it all would end up thrown away without much thought to the time and energy put into it. I helped him move a bunch of stuff into the barn that had been deemed worthless by his family. It was fencing and siding and buckets and pipes and poles. Stuff that Sandy would have been delighted to find at an estate sale, stuff that was practical and much needed on a farm. Regardless of the work we did that morning, it's all likely to end up in a dumpster. Dallas has a life to get back to and his family is determined to get the property sold as quickly as possible.
We left that afternoon, me onto the next part of my frivolous trip, Dallas onto a deeply profound new phase of his life. We drove into the mellow afternoon sun, away from the idyllic little farm his mom built in the middle of nowhere, towards the desolate warehouses popping up next to the highway. This part of Indiana is changing pretty rapidly. It seems like the world is changing pretty rapidly, and it makes me think about all the good things like Sandy's empire ending unceremoniously, and how they'll never come back again.
