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By BILL THOMPSON
When I walked up in that yard I seemed to have stepped back about a hundred years.
There was nothing there to tell me that just a few miles down the road hundreds of automobiles were emitting their fumes and people were in a hurry to get somewhere.
I had driven to the old house down a two-rutted road that ran across a tobacco field and a small creek. It wasn’t the kind of place you passed on the way to somewhere else; you had to intend to go there.
The house had been built about 1890 but there was nothing about it that reflected the usual Victorian architecture of the period. It was a typical, utilitarian house built by a farmer. The long front porch, the tin roof and the separate kitchen were part of the no-frills building.
But it wasn’t the house so much as the surroundings that gave me that feeling of being in another time. Old, moss-laden oak trees shaded the house and the yard. And it was a yard, not a lawn. Even after all the years of neglect there was very little grass growing there and only a few weeds. Most of it was bare ground that had been swept hundreds of times by a brush broom.
The slight breeze that blew under the shade of the trees belied the heat that covered the surrounding fields. Little “dust devils,” small whirlwinds of dust, blew across the fields then vanished without a trace. All that remained was the soft sound of the breeze rustling the leaves in the oak trees.
There was an old barn some distance from the house. It seemed to be in worse condition than the house. Patches of straw still hung from the loft door. The sun and rain had turned the hay a grey color and rounded the moldy mound until it looked like some kind of textured rock.
I walked into the house. The door was open and hung on one rusty hinge. Inside, the rooms were completely empty but I knew that they must have been used to store tobacco because the pungent smell of the dried leaves still hung in the musty air. As I walked through the house, I startled a bird that had made its nest in the rafters. The beat of its wings sounded especially loud in the silent afternoon.
Across a little porch from the main part of the house was the kitchen. A shaft of sunlight shone through a broken windowpane onto the floor and I saw a glint of metal through the dust. It came from an old spoon that had been left behind by the last residents. I wiped off the dust, looked at it more closely, and started to put it in my pocket. Then I changed my mind and placed the spoon back on the floor. It wasn’t mine. It belonged to the house.
As I finished my tour of the house, I naturally wondered about the people who had lived there. I knew that it had changed hands many times in its history. The original owner had sold it and it had been used as a tenant house then finally as storage space for tobacco. Now its time of usefulness, like the tobacco it had stored, was gone.
There wasn’t anything to make the house different from hundreds of others just like it that had been built all across eastern North Carolina. It wasn’t worth much monetarily. We have all seen houses like that. Some of us lived in them. Still, there was something about it that made me feel wistful for another time. I wondered what had happened to the people who had lived there, to the children who had gown up there. Would they remember the house?
It didn’t really matter because in a few hours it would be gone. I saw the tractor-trailer rig loaded with a bulldozer coming down the two-rutted road.
I left before the equipment was unloaded.