Discovery of the Day:

Our Lives Are Meaningless and Nothing We Ever Do Will Last.

I made the above cheery realization today when I made a field trip a couple of miles from my house.  I explored the ruins of Yama Farms, an elaborate and ambitious Catskills resort whose glory days were the years 1913-1939.  There's a terrific website about Yama Farms here.

I hiked and crashed through streams and scrambled through brush, eventually finding myself at the ruins of the Tea House over the lake.  Mind you, seventy years ago there were manicured paths, fences, and real Asian Ladies (tm) (as Yama Farms had an elaborate Japanese flavor) -- the entire resort was Done Up to the Nines.  There's nary a hint of that now.  The lake is gone.  The verdant gardens and stone paths and structures have returned to forest as though they never existed.

Then and Now (pic on the right is mine, taken today):

The greenish piece of wood on the lower left is a piece of stair.

A few of the Yama Farms houses remain, further up the hill (I tried driving up to them but I think I alarmed the people there).  Some of the houses are abandoned.  Last weekend I made a preliminary run with boyfriend Steve, sister Lucy, and friend Stella, and we found the old Yama Farms Playhouse on the upper grounds:

I hold this playhouse a stage which must be gutted, replaced with drywall and made into a family dwelling, then abandoned and left to the elements.

The front door opened with a push.  We poked around inside -- someone had been living there, fairly recently and probably without permission.  Nearly every window had been broken.  Clothing, beer cans, food containers, and moldy piles of unknown matter lay scattered across the moldy carpeting.  A thick sadness hung in the air.

I do so love the sign: "I hold the world -- a stage where every man must play a part."  I am wistful, thinking of the Playhouse's triumphant unveiling -- or for that matter the party that greeted the opening of the Tea House pictured above. 

Abandoned malls do much the same for me.  Somebody, somewhere, was excited about them when they opened.  It makes me sad being around a neglected, empty place where once there may have been a balloon bouquet.