The library, church, elementary and junior high school were buildings significant to my childhood. Their appearances would suggest that they were built around the same era with bricks from the same brickyard perhaps by the same bricklayers. I never knew their history only their halls and rooms.
A tornado destroyed the schools. The old library has been purchased for an upscale living space. The church still has service once a week by a visiting pastor who says God is good. The organist plays but there is no choir. High on the steeple, bells still ring out the time and a tune.
oh what memories
built from debris of the past
rip through the springtime
___________________
dVerse prompt to write a haibun on your hometown
wordshophop 
I know everything changes, but that seems excessive. Those important anchors lost – changing world, changing values…
LikeLike
It was excessive – $18 million damage from the tornado in 1968, in the 1980s the Chicago Great Western Railway closed shop and took the jobs after 90 years of business there. Then meth moved in. Sad story of my hometown but when I was there last fall I saw hope.
LikeLike
Time and profit ripping through lives. I don’t know how much memories count for when the reality has changed so much. I hate going back.
LikeLike
This is devastation. Tragic. Penned so well.
LikeLike
I can see those beautiful buildings in my mind’s eye. Thanks for sharing.
LikeLike
There are some brilliant observations in your haibun, detail and conjecture, that make this wonderful to read.
LikeLike
Thank you
LikeLike
Progress takes so much of the past…yet some details remain..the church bell. Thank goodness for our indelible memories.
LikeLike
All this happens to small towns around the world… after a while nothing is left except the houses…
LikeLike
I like the description of only knowing the halls and rooms and not the history of the buildings.
LikeLike
I like the concise and unsoftened approach you use to tell the story, such a tragic one, and yet those memories live on, expressed so beautifully in your haiku.
LikeLike
your haibun shows two sides of a story of a place that has been through a tragedy and manages to continue strong. i think of the left behind things that give the place its character, some things like that are never damaged by disaster.
LikeLike