The Old Homestead

Yesterday morning I was out in the rural countryside of western Itawamba County and driving around a bend in the road I came upon a side view of a huge old abandoned homestead standing majestically like a sentinel overlooking the nearby road in the cold November landscape. Looking at this scene, a verse from a poem entitled The Old Homestead by Alice Cary comes to mind:

And when the winds moan wildly,
When the woods are bare and brown
And when the swallow’s clay-built nest
From the rafter crumbles down;
When all the untrod garden-paths
Are heaped with frozen leaves,
And icicles, like silver spikes,
Are set along the eaves;

Verse from: The Old Homestead by Alice Cary, From Friends’ Intelligencer, Volume XXV, Philadelphia, 1869.