Back to Nature

On the way to Kenyon College awhile back, I passed this old school house in rural Ohio. I wonder where the students are now, the ones that would have been sitting stiffly on hard wooden desk-seats here, and the ones who graduated many school years ago? This area is farm and Amish country, a pastoral gem. I imagine there's a brick and glass county school somewhere nearby, or maybe not so close by. Either way, one day decades ago, the students and teachers here got up and walked out, leaving their old place of learning for Nature to consume. The former pupils, who may have felt a ruler across young knuckles or pigtails dipped in inkwells or the pride of spelling and math success, now reside all across the state, I imagine, maybe even the country and world. One might be a governor, another homeless, and still another about to be a grandmother. Or maybe they're all as lifeless as their old school. Emerson would have called this building Art, the natural world molded into a structure by human hands. As it came from nature, so it returns.