Oklahoma Foreclosure Blues

I was wandering the back-roads of Major County in NW Oklahoma. The roads were muddy. I was lost, but wouldn't admit it as per my geographic training. But I was looking for one of them Oklahoma "rock roads" the "farm to market" roads raise up higher that the fields around it and covered with gravel or chat. Sometimes however they are mythical and I was having troubles.
I was in my Red Chevy truck but my city kids were following behind me in a low bottom sedan.
They were not happy with me and disconcerted cause the daughter-in-law (ridding in the car) was suppose to be a hundred miles away helping her best friend fix up a church for the friends wedding.

So imagine their unpleasantness when I stopped to take this picture of a lonely house bent over from the SW winds and abandoned. There used to be more of these around. One almost every quarter section when I was growing up in SW Oklahoma. For you citified readers a quarter section was 160 acres and was about all a farmer could handle out on the plains plowing with mules back when this land was opened for settlement. Probably 2/3rd of all those farms and homes were sold off or foreclosed on in the great depression. For many of them, the "Jodes" just walked away.

I was surprised when my son said , "Dad a big bird has landed on top of that house."

I'll be dang I said. (sure I did)

His wife was the daughter-in-law and none to glad hubby had pointed out another picture to me.

Turns out the big bird was a vulture and seems to have had a nest in the chimney of the old home. I took pictures of the parent feeding the chicks down inside the bricks, but mud and time wouldn't let me get in closer.

Somehow a vulture taking over an old abandoned (possibly even foreclosed) property seem just too apropos and poetical to let it go by.