It's Beautiful Here. Life in the eye of a hurricane.

Riding through life one day…I came upon a gate. Fashioned from scrap metal and finished in Mother Nature's signature patina of rust, it was a long forgotten discouragement, left behind after the coal was gone. Helplessly named Private Property, a custodian assigned to limit and control access to something…or somewhere; all while freely sharing through a holey, windowed construct, the remote beauty and intrigue within. There, through her cold countenance, in a shroud of snowfall, a pearly path of ascension rolled and ranged ever up and out of view. Riding through life one day…I came upon a gate.

I don’t know why I was so unsettled; the end was inevitable. But still, there is something deep within us always surprised by change. Here today, gone tomorrow. Coasting down the slight grade on South State Street one September afternoon in 2015, I was moved to stop and take a picture. The bricks and mortar constituting the structure have stood for more or less 100 years. Thanks to a long-since changed demographic and the vicissitudes of time, the building was condemnable, making a last stand in what was once Lewis, Indiana’s business district. With roof missing, walls shifted and cracked, windows shuttered by plywood long turned grey, she spoke softly with the sadness of an unvisited grandmother. Earlier this fall while on my way home from somewhere I took a detour through the increasingly unfamiliar streets of Lewis. My grandparents, Helen and Titus, lived on the corner of E. Green Drive and S. State Street. During childhood, my summer job was to patrol these streets on ...