Window Lilies #01019

The Story

This abandoned one room schoolhouse was found sitting square in the middle of a farm field with freshly plowed earth all around. It was from a long ago time when rural education was done in these small one room schoolhouses around the countryside. And to set the old wooden building off even further, it was completely surrounded by blooming orange daylilies along the four sides.

The window frame and muntins were still intact but weathered. The old paint was disappearing everywhere leaving a gray woodgrain finish. Four panes of glass were missing that let the birds fly in and out at will, and they did. In the summer heat, bees buzzed around the orange wildflowers. The summer heat also baked the plowed earth which smelled like the countryside and life waiting to go on.

As with a lot of older rural America, time certainly passed this old schoolhouse by quite a while ago, stranded adrift in the middle of that field. I stood in the newly plowed furrows to make this shot, done on slide film years ago.

It wasn’t in too bad a condition, all told. Not all the windows were broken out around the building and the solid paneled door was still closed, yet the birds flew in and out. One room schoolhouse to birdhouse, I’d suppose. There was no human damage or graffiti, so this old building was no doubt too far from the car for most vandals, if they ever found it at all way out in the farmland.

Location: rural Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks