On fleetingness, fatality and other beatiful points in life.

It seems only fitting that, as the first post was in Finnish, this one is not. Welcome, again, to the booze cabinet of the platypus. Tonight we shall ponder for a while on the fleetingness of life. Some of you may now wonder how this came to be. I'm ill equipped to explain, so I'll show you. Come along on a journey I made last weekend, and see what I have seen. Maybe even think upon it.

 On Saturday morning, we woke up to a light snow. It wasn't enough to keep us inside: it was barely enough to chill the cats' paws and send them scurrying for warm cushions. The sky seemed clear enough when we packed ourselves and the gear into the car.

 Here was our first stop. Down the river had, years before, come a huge ferrying of wood every summer. Only a few kilometers downriver was the watermill and the saw that it powered. Here was where we were headed.

 

 Across the street from the riverside saw lies an old, now abandoned farmhouse. Left on its own for some dozen of years, it has now crumbled down and decayed. It's a spooky place, to say the least.

 After browsing around for a while it became apparent that the place had never been properly emptied, nor made ready for anyone to move in again. As I stood there, camera in my hand, I couldn't help but wonder who would just up and leave a house like that. Probably much more than a house: a home. Old clothes, christmas decorations on the windows, everything simply left there for time and weather. What motivates that in a person?

  

The old sawmill had fared even worse than the house. After some browsing we found the blackened boards under the snow: the place had burned down, and had never been repaired. There was abandoned bits of gear lying here and there, like we had jumped to an alternate now that was in a steampunk era. Everything made of wood was starting to sack and break.

 The mill coop, now devoid of it's water wheel, had not fared much better than the saw. The water house's door, hanging on it's last hinge refused to lay down the secrets of the place.

 The weather fluctuated quite a bit during the day. We had some light snow, some less light snow, and even a bit of sunshine. The color changed oddly from minute to minute, almost as if time was moving on triple speed.

 

On the way back to the world. So odd that less than an hour away from our everyday lives there's such detachment, a place that's just been left for it's own. In the end we were left wondering what must have happened for all that to be simply left there. What makes a person leave half of what they own, the whole house and simply go? Why was it never sold forward? What even makes a home? I'll return to this later, if I feel like it. For now, I hope you enjoyed the day we now spent in the old farmhouse and mill, abandoned by the river.