Blog Archives
handbag
I don’t know why there was an old vinyl handbag hanging on the wall of an abandoned building in a tiny, out of the way town.
However, I do know that there was nothing inside of it.
Dime Box, Texas
photographed 6.15.2024
lilies, considered
On the front end of a recent trip, we encountered a cemetery that was home to approximately all the stickers in the entire world; it was in a town called Old Dime Box.
On the way back to the airport at the other end of the trip, we found a well-organized and manicured cemetery; it was in a town called Dime Box.
Go figure.
St. John’s Lutheran Cemetery
Dime Box, Texas
photographed 6.15.2024
Three flavors
Beats me. Maybe in the summer this car serves as an ice cream stand?
When I go someplace like Dime Box, where I’ve never been before, I have the feeling that everything has looked just the way I saw it approximately forever. (I know things have changed, of course, or all these old buildings that I find would still be pristine.) So, that car, with its numbered windshield, and the mysterious ice cream signage? Been that way for years. Right? So it was a tiny bit of a surprise to look at the same scene on Google Maps and notice that my perceptions are wrong.
Dime Box, Texas
photographed 2.28.2014
Push
A detail of the doors on the right end of this block of buildings.
I like a lot of things here – the square wire grid that’s installed behind the regular screen on the door, the instructions to PUSH, the thumbtack with a tiny scrap of paper still attached.
I also like to think about how, when this place was still in business, the sound of the screen door slapping shut punctuated every entry and exit. And how on the first warm spring days, the proprietor left the inside doors open so she could hear birdsong from the trees across the street filtered through that double-layer screen door.
Dime Box, Texas
photographed 2.28.2014
Facing the tracks
Dime Box, Texas, is not the funniest town name in America. Traditionally, that honor belongs to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. I prefer Scratch Ankle, Alabama, Gnowbone, Indiana, or even Humptulips, Washington. Nevertheless, Dime Box, as a name, caught my ear, so that’s where I headed the next morning out of College Station.
– William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Even though William Least Heat-Moon’s visit to Dime Box was written a while back (Blue Highways was published in 1982), much of his description of the town sounded as though he’d been there earlier the same day as my visit. For example, he describes this scene as “worn brick buildings facing the Southern Pacific tracks.” Maybe that bright aluminum door has been added since his visit, but my guess is that the rest of the block looks much the same as it did the day he drove over to Dime Box from College Station.
Dime Box, Texas
photographed 2.28.2014
One Day | One Image 