Old Town

I took these pics the other day in the parking lot of an abandoned furniture store on Route 78, which is just around the corner from where we live in Cibolo, TX. Not sure if this is actually Cibolo, or the next town over, Schertz - we live very close to the town lines.



this is the rather run-down apartment complex right next door.



An old caboose and an old fire engine in the parking lot - it's hard to believe with those sorts of marketing gimmicks that this place went out of business.



Cibolo/Schertz is a community in transition. Not long ago, it was a sleepy rural area made up of ranches. In the last decade many of those ranches have been plowed under and been replaced by subdivisions of McMansions. At the other end of Farm Road 3009, about 3 miles from where these pictures were taken, is I-35, and huge strip malls filled with big box (and little box) stores. We sit right between the two. I think of this photographed area as Old Town Cibolo - or maybe Schertz - and what is coming not far to the West as the future.

There's some soul to these old town areas, but it's a poor soul, a minimal soul, a scraping by, selling cheap things expensively soul. I don't romantacize corrugated tin buildings and sole proprietorship liquor stores. But still, something will be lost when these places are plowed under, too, along with the cow fields.