Denny always has at least a couple of good stories for me when I visit him and his family. Last year, he talked about the value of beach glass as we drove around Lake Erie and photographed lighthouses. (He walked the beaches collecting beach glass while we took photographs.) This year, we stopped at abandoned farms—some were Amish and others had been owned by middle class families. The above photo is of a barn located in the countryside in northwestern Pennsylvania. Denny explained that more and more farmers were having to leave their farms because it just costs too much to keep them going.

“It’s really sad,” he commented, “because it is a ‘way’ of life that is changing.”

Over the years, I have so enjoyed visiting Denny and his wife Joy. Always at the top of our list of things to do is driving through the rolling countryside of this beautiful part of America. I am always awed by the peacefulness of the farm land, which was green, green, green in the summer and wonderfully quiet and welcoming in the snowy winter.

The barn in the above photo is abandoned, of course. We stopped to photograph it because it looked like it had a face—a sad face because no one is using it anymore.

Here’s another farm. This one is Amish. The way we know this is because of the corm that is gathered up in the fields and also the white barn and structures.

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