Vacant lots appear here and there along the roads leading into town and among the town itself. Houses have caught fire and burned to the ground; the owners have died and the house stays abandoned for years and begins to fall apart, and pretty soon someone comes along and tears it down, or the volunteer fire department torches it as a training exercise and then the land is cleared. On the road to town is a large cleared area where a house and a church once stood. It was demolished last year, and scattered clumps of daffodils are the only evidence that someone’s home once stood there. Indeed, on our own land, an ancient stone-bordered flower bed very near the state highway right-of-way produced daffodils and iris for years and years after the house had been moved for the original highway bypass around the town. This continued until it was wiped out by the highway expansion in the late 1990s. Another victim of the highway expansion was a house across the road. But again, there is no evidence now that a house was ever there, except for the wisteria that someone originally planted to grow along the fence at the back of the property. The fence is still there, and so is the wisteria, but as this plant is prone to do (from personal experience, this is the plant from hell), it apparently grew tired of the fence and has spread... everywhere. It is a most amazing thing to see. And this photograph doesn’t do it justice. It has climbed way up into several large trees and has produced a mass of drooping clusters of purple flowers. It is truly gorgeous.
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