March 2024 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

This month, I must dispense with the usual ridicule that is the stock-in-trade here. Spring is coming and we are enjoying a warm spell in the upper Hudson Valley. Today, a yellow colts foot was blooming by the side of the country road I hike up most days — a hopeful sign, and don’t try to annoy me with your climate change bullshit.  Sometimes there are warm spells at the end of winter. These days, our country, the USA, languishes in miasma of anxiety and despair. It’s a sad time and this is a sad photograph. The house, a glorified shack, is about seventy years old, a wreck. Two years ago the people who owned the property started to renovate the house. They got a new roof on, but I’m informed that they ran out of money and haven’t been back to work on it since 2022. Our country, and many of the people in it, are running out of money. They’ve also run out of faith in the people who are in charge of every institution: the government and its labyrinth of agencies, the health care system, the courts, the schools, the banks, the arts, their church, you name it. Many can’t find the faith to believe that we will ever again fix these things, which form the scaffold of our lives.

The red arrow points to the horse that lives on the property. Her name is Angie. She is 29, which is quite old for a horse. Angie has easy access to about five acres of pasture that slopes down to a small pond about 100 feet across. Some days she hangs out in the barn and watches the action on the road. She used to have a companion horse, but the companion died two years ago and now Angie is alone. A lady comes over here regularly and brings Angie hay and grain, and brushes the cockleburs out of her mane.  I used to bring Angie carrots, but she has lost some teeth, and I can tell it hurts her mouth to chomp them. Lately, if she’s anywhere near the road, I just go down to the battered fence and give her a few strokes along her cheek muscle. She seems to appreciate that more than the carrots.

Horses are social animals. The herd is their society and Angie is without her society. I suspect a lot of people in this land are isolated and alone these days, cast outside a society that is falling apart like the house in the picture. It’s not a good thing. Personally, I believe we’ll pass through this hard time to a new disposition of things and this project of being human will continue. I’m even inclined to think there will be more horses in our lives when that comes around. In the meantime, I admire Angie’s lonely fortitude. We cheer each other up. I keep moving and she keeps browsing in the grass that has begun stirring back to life. Next month, we’ll get back to comedy.

Angie, close up.