The Final Monday Photo

And T.S. Eliot

It’s Different (A Photo Gallery )

This is both a promise and a lament. I’ve visited the Braun Farm almost every Monday for more than a decade making photos week to week through the changing seasons, hurried harvests, and winter fallows.

This was the last Monday. The farm structures are gone. The farmland remains.

This season, the first without a barn to store implements, seeds, fertilizer, and tractors will have a harvest of hay and corn. The first without a farmhouse to remind passers-by of the family heritage recorded beginning in the 1830 maps of Blendon Township.

The barn is now in a landfill with the farmhouse. The concrete slabs and blocks are in the recycling plant perhaps to be returned to the land as new slabs and blocks for new homes on the farm.

One day, when I’m gone and the Westerville History Museum curates my photo collection, our ancestors can look back at this day as part of the visual record of Westerville. Where it was and what it’s become. And what it will be.

It will be different.
It’s already different.
It’s always different.
It’s different again.

Time present and time past.
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
T.S. Eliot