This is not a painting by Andrew Wyeth—although it could be. This is a photograph of a house in Engelhard, NC by the late Ernie Kale. The double gabled three-story house would have been grand anywhere but must have been doubly so in nineteenth century Engelhard, a tiny fishing village on the coast. How could someone build such an elegant structure, and then leave to rot?
Locals tell a tale of a man who built the home for his girlfriend, yet the pair never tied the knot. No one can tell us why they failed to commit. Did they lack resolution? Passion? Did they quarrel so much during construction that they decided to pack it in before they’d even begun?
I can imagine a child sent to the front porch to shuck corn for supper. She lifts her face to catch the ocean breeze, and then meanders through the orchard her grandfather planted after his honeymoon with her grandmother. She tosses the cornhusks onto the compost heap at the bottom of the garden and fills her apron with peaches on the way back inside.
But the house never became a home. No one loved it and cared for it through the generations. That it stands at all is a testament to its builder. The Atlantic hurls a hurricane at this bit of coastline at least once or twice a season. For me, the significance is not that it still stands, but what it stands for.
The house is a grand dream unfulfilled—a goal set and realized, but then forgotten. Dreams require our perseverance to bring them to fruition, and then our attention to keep them going. Yes, there will be setbacks, but the worst fate a dream can suffer is to be abandoned like the house in Engelhard tattered by time.
