The Country Store

Yesterday, I read a blog post about abandoned country stores.

It brought me back to a post I wrote in August of 2013.  If any of you have memories of the 1970's and 1980's "back to the land movement",  my spouse and I were part of that.

Not in a "hippie" way.  We weren't hippies - no, we were far from it, probably about as far from it as you could get.  But here we were anyway.

We were afraid the economy was tanking, along with a lot of other people.  Although we were in our late 20's, we found ourselves trying to prepare for a future that was uncertain.  Part of it was reading a magazine called "Mother Earth News" and deciding we were going to "live off the land". Oh, and by the way, neither of us had any relatives that had ever pursued the rural life.  We were fully urban. 

And yet....we had dreams of self-sufficiency, of living the "organic way", and Arkansas turned out to be the place where we were going to make them come true.  My spouse was in the Air Force, he was stationed in Wichita, Kansas and his enlistment was going to be up in another year.  We went on a vacation in 1979 and bought land.  We moved a year after my spouse left the military, and gave it a good shot.

We lasted five years.

It was five years we are proud of.  We learned skills, we learned there was courage in us we didn't think we had, and we learned that failure means only that you tried, and you need to do something different.   I should remember that leap of faith I took back in my 20's now, as I draw closer to retirement.

A life without trying and failing is not a life at all.

You know what?  Our dreams really did come true in theyears after we left.  My spouse and I are still married.  We have a grown son, born after we left and returned to New York State.  We are still curious, still wanting to champion the sustainable lifestyle.

Why did we fail?

We were too unprepared, still too immature.  And, Arkansas wasn't ready for us, either.

We and Arkansas both changed between 1979 and 2013 when I made the trip I'm going to mention.  We moved towards each other in those years.  Maybe we didn't meet in the middle, but we did meet.

So I wanted to take you on parts of the drive we made in late August of 2013, the first (and only) time we returned after we left.

Northwest Arkansas has grown tremendously since we left.  Just from 2000 to 2010, the population grew 71%.

But, at some point in the nearly 27 mile drive from Fayetteville to our former land, it was almost like time had stood still.  The roads were back down to two lanes.  Farmers drove slowly.  The traffic lights disappeared. Round hay bales stood in the fields.  Cattle grazed.

We went through Canehill, an incorporated place that could have been great except for the Civil War.   Several historic buildings, in ruins, the remnants of its former history as a college town, and a ruined mill, can be seen if you know where to look.  And we did know, even though we had never bothered to investigate its history when we had lived near there.

Then we made the turn into the small town of Morrow.

We passed what used to be the Morrow Cash Store, a true general store. (We didn't go in).  More about the Morrow Country Store in a moment.

Then, we turned onto the road where we lived.  A little of it is paved now, but most of it is still unpaved.  Just like when we left.

So let me tell you what we found. 

We had two neighbors.  One (we had found this out right before we left) died in 2012 and the other died several months before we made the 2013 trip.

The house of one of them (he and his wife had moved before we did) was gone  - absolutely no trace of it, or his barn.  No foundation, no nothing.  As of 2012 the other neighbor's widow was still living exactly where they had been. I don't know if she, as a widow, moved, but, but her trailer was there.

The cabin my spouse built with the help of a neighbor's son and we lived in - gone.  Our chicken house - gone.

The peach tree we had planted - gone.  My roses.  My flower beds.  Gone.

Our garden areas - gone.  Our raspberries - gone.
 
We will never return to Morrow.  There is no need.  Only ghosts of our past remained, and we let them go.  They flew away in the hot, late August breeze, dust in the wind.

So, when I read the blog post about abandoned country stores, my memory went right back to this trip.

I did a search for the "Morrow Country Store" and found it on Facebook. I found that it had still been in the family that owned it back when we bought our land in 1979.   But....I found it too late.

It closed in June.

It has new owners, but it has a new name and its business model has changed.


But what was once there...gone.