There’s a part of me that loves secret things, and few things hold a secret as well as a gap in a history.
I love the abandoned things, the derelict places, where there’s no one to know the details; lost factories in the middle of marshes, crumbling warehouses standing tribute to industries that are now remembered politically rather than practically, or lost items of clothing that cling to the scent of people who have long since forgotten them.
They beckon.
You remind me…yesterday I walked through the gardens of an estate-turned-tourist-stop near my home (an estate that until 1962 was in one family for six generations…an unfathomable amount of genealogy time on the same plot of soil here in the U.S) and I came upon a cement bench where, at one corner, withering in the sun, was a small collection of gathered dogwood petals, buttercups, and tiny lavender flowers not known to me. I wondered, “Who abandoned these here? A child in haste? Or a teen, whose attempt at expressing feelings to another were spurned?”
The writer in me responds to a scene of abandonment with a story.
Yes, that definitely speaks of a story! I get the same feeling when I find pressed flowers or leaves in books.