Some Reasons Why

In the summer of 2022, I was walking along a road in my neighborhood when I spotted it — a farmhouse. And not the faux Joanna Gaines variety, but a real one. Over 3,000 square feet, built in 1900, complete with a spring house, tucked against a hill around a wooded bend that delighted me every time it came into view.

I was newly divorced then, stubbornly optimistic, and told myself that if it ever hit the market and I could remotely afford it, I’d buy that home and its beautiful land. A few weeks later, it did.

And, of course, it immediately sold.

And then, in a move that felt personally targeted, the buyers demolished it within a month. All that history, all that potential — gone in an instant. I’m not here to shame them; maybe it was a Jenny Curran situation and the horrors inside were better left compacted into the earth. Maybe the bones were so far gone that restoration wasn’t realistic. But still, it stung.

Not long after, developers moved into the forest across the road. Timber started rolling out from the hillside to make way for a new community. I sighed. That field was where I first took my camera to practice photography. There had been a certain mischief in my step as I leaned over the live-wire fence, camera in hand, thinking, This is what real photographers do. Trespass.

If I went back now, I’d find a runoff pond and a stripped landscape waiting for retirement homes.

I had a hard time reconciling the need for change with my desire to keep the landscape of yesterday. Oh god, I was getting old.

So… what could I do? The only thing I could: take photos and share the ephemeral pieces of this place on the internet. Maybe the countryside doesn’t stand a chance against an expanding population, but the memory of historic Appalachia can at least live on a server somewhere — until someone needs that space too.

You could not convince me this wasn’t peak photography at the time.