In the spring of 1994, I was on my way to Minneapolis and decided to stop in North Dakota. My mother was born in North Dakota, on a farm halfway between Litchville and Marion, in a house that her grandfather Jacob Stroeder built from the ground up with his two strong German hands. All I had to go on was the picture above from Appolonia Stroeder's wedding (about 1910) and an old letter from 1963 describing very vaguely the way to get to the farm.
I drove around aimlessly through beautiful flat empty roads, navigating direction by the turn of the sunflowers. After visiting Litchville and Marion, with no one in those tiny towns willing or able to tell me where I needed to go, I meandered through the back roads toward Fargo. And then, out of the blue, I saw it, standing there in the middle of a field. Derelict, but still standing, with the beautiful sunburst ornamentation on the dormers. I parked on the road and hiked in to the house through the field, explored inside along with racoon scat and barn swifts who were none too happy to see me. Finally, the farmer who owned the land came down to investigate what I was doing. I explained and he was so gracious. He took me through the whole house, let me take pictures and videotape and told me I was lucky to have come when I did, as they were going to have to demolish the old house. So I took one last picture among many, as close to the wedding view as I could manage.
The farmer and his wife have passed over now. So has the old house. I'm glad I got to linger in its spirit for a little while.
The House with Nobody in It
Whenever I walk to Suffern, along the Erie track
I go by a poor old farmhouse with its shingles broken and black.
I suppose I've passed it a hundred times, but I always stop for a minute
and look at the house, the tragic house, the house with nobody in it.
...But a house that has done what a house should do,
a house that has sheltered life,
That has put its loving wooden arms around a man and his wife,
A house that has echoed a baby's laugh and held up her stumbling feet,
is the saddest sight, when it's left alone, that ever your eyes could meet.
So whenever I go to Suffern along the Erie track
I never go by the empty house without stopping and looking back,
Yet it hurts me to look at the crumbling roof and the shutters fallen apart,
For I can't help thinking the poor old house is a house with a broken heart.
Joyce Kilmer
