Below, a photo of the old pasture beside my house. It's gone now--plowed under. It used to be the home of hundreds of birds. Deer spent the daylight hours in the grove of trees across the year round creek. There were apple and crababble trees, willows and wildflowers. All gone. Now it's a furrowed field of corn stubble growing ragweed and garlic mustard. The year it was plowed and planted was the horrible draught of 2013. The crops withered and died so the farmer abandoned it.
The secluded lane to my farm. Trees are gone now. The farmer cut them down this spring. Farmers detest trees.
Came across the poem below and loved it.
The Golden Years
All I do these drawn-out days
Is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge,
Where there are no pheasants to be seen,
And last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
And spend the day there playing bridge,
But lack of a falls and the absence of quail
Would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
And another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
So I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.
~ Billy Collins - former U S Poet Laureate
(“The Golden Years”
hearkens back to a simpler time, when the purity of nature thrived, undisturbed
by the destructive tendencies of human expansion. Locations with namesakes
paying homage to the animals and geological formations found there are now
representing them nominally only.)
