Abandoned Farmhouse

Nobody lives here anymore
25 years ago she left
To live with her widowed sister
- Two old women with no old men
To look after anymore.

Nobody wanted the farm
Couldn't make a living
And the girls went to the City
Neighbour didn't need the hay that year
The barn long gone.

She took a last look around
Walked out the front door and turned the key
Slipped it in her purse, she couldn't tell why
Stepped away down the two flat stone stairs
Between the lilacs and the daylily beds.

In a hot dry summer
I found her house
Hidden in the spruce and fir that took the hayfields
Saw the barn foundation, a hollow full of brambles
Ringed with wild cherry and leaning apple trees.

The lilacs were blooming
Their scent was heavy around me
A stranger peering into the dark front hall
The peeling blue-painted door's still locked
A yellow rag of lace rotting in its window.

I'm a country woman, though
I know to walk around
Past the stone well
To the never-locked backdoor
Straight into her cool dim kitchen.

Flowered worn linoleum growing moss
Cluster flies on the dusty window sills
Chipped and rusting cast-iron sink in the corner
And I'm thinking of the dishes she did up
And the babies she washed there.