Why am I here? Why are we here? What happens after we die? I can answer the first two. It’s a non-main street in a medium-sized town on the Plains, a place that once had more commercial vigor than exists today. Every town of a certain size has one of these - cast-off, tired, half-abandoned, but full of history.

I think that’s why I went here. Let’s see if there’s anything interesting. (Again, I clipped these a while ago, and am now looking at them one by one without looking ahead.)

This is not a good augur.

Hey! That’s nice

Googling . . . uh oh. “Yelpers report this location has closed.” No Facebook updates since 2015.

Nice little shame-door there, Bob.

Once a gas station, always a gas station.

That view, with the old two-story commercial structure in the background, could sum up this entire feature.

If you get the sense of a place time sprinted past without a second glance, you might be right. It's as if downtown just decided to go elsewhere and start anew.

And here it is.

Car dealership? I don’t know. The garage doors and big display windows suggest so.

It’s literally Main Street.

White noise makes it easier to sleep:

"Was there ever anything between? That’s an old ghost.

Pelletier’s. Old pic of the interior of the store at Christmas time, here. The original store was demolished long ago; the store itself closed in 1943, merged into another.

As has happened a thousand times in towns across the nation.

The new - or rather, most recent brick makes it look like the chambers the Pompeii discoverers spoiled when they hit a wall and dug down, destroying the frescos.

What happens when a building goes into the witness protection program, perhaps

They’ll open eventually. It’s this or church.”

It’s like someone pulled the plug

Two ways of dealing with it.

The most recent photos show it’s been spruced up a bit.

Planters. That’ll do it.