Morning Thanks--even those that are no more

It's gone now--an old farm house I stumbled across one Saturday morning. Abandoned farm places disappear quickly in Sioux County, where good, wooden shoe capitalists know the land is far too valuable to dedicate to memories. You don’t need to go too far west or east to find many more of them scattered around a section, monuments some farm folks can't push themselves to bulldoze. There's something eerie about 'em, something, well, abandoned. 

They speak a language of another time, a time when there were more here, when farms were smaller and families were bigger. When children's voices carried endlessly across the treeless prairie,, when everything people did out here cost more time and sweat and perseverence. It was no golden age. Never has been. 

This house had a mousetrap on the back door frame--probably a homemade "leave a message" sort of thing. I have no idea why the silly mousetrap grabbed my attention the way it did, or why it sticks with me somehow, begging a revelation or a moral to the story. There's no deeply embedded truth in some long-gone farmer's nailing a mousetrap to the doorframe of the back door. 

There it is. Maybe it speaks of a neighborliness long departed. After all, today the place has no neighbors. For that matter, it’s no longer a place. Today, it's beans. Six months from now, it'll be bare naked, maybe a bit of snow. Today, there on the door there is no mousetrap. There is no door.
  
It's all gone--house and barn, out buildings, trees and weeds and mousetrap. 
  
Sic transit gloria mundi? Ah, that's pushing it.  Probably never was any glory there. And after all, what I'm talking about is nothing more than a repurposed mousetrap. 

Still, once upon a time someone made a life here. Once there were children. Once there were cows probably--and pigs. Once chickens ran helter-skelter across the lawn and cats slept like a ball of fur in a sun spot on a tractor seat. 

I'll never know who, and few will because it's all gone, even the barn and the barbed wire. See that mousetrap. It ain't. No more messages.

I'm always thankful for mysteries, even the little ones that, like a repurposed mousetrap, hold you fast when they are no more.