I was wondering as I drove home this morning, how long has this been here? I mean, the roads, the power lines, the farms... the buildings. The touch of "civilization". When I got out of college I was able to visit Ireland for a short tour. It was wonderful; beautiful. I could really feel the landscape had been there for a very long time. Hundreds and thousands of years; there had been people living there, one people (and yes, I know that Ireland went through the same cultural and ethnic changes over a thousand years that every other geographical region has been through. That's not my point here.)

And the community where I grew up- my "people" had been there four hundred years. I always knew that the buildings had been there, the cultural footprint. I had been born to know that land, those hills, those sounds and smells. The corn in the summer. The chill in the winter. The crispness of early winter days that steals your breath and makes your nose burn. I grew up three or four streets over from the house where my grandmother was born. In the front bedroom, overlooking the street. She grew up there. Her brother lived in that house until the day he died, smoking smelly cigars and making wisecracks.

I live in a town where there is a sense of history, but that history seems overlaid on the landscape somehow. I sit in a church with old wood pews, with plain brickwork made beautiful from the masonry that curved it into all those glorious arches, all the way up to the open rafters. Old pictures, old buildings, those are familiar like the old buildings in my hometown. But I wonder... if I walked in the graveyards would I find the same sense of history and continuance? I am afraid to go and miss the red fieldstone markers, their carvings all but undetectable. Limestone worn away. 1600s. 1700s. The first Gehman ancestor to come to these shores and settle is buried within walking distance of the house I grew up in.

Those are just my morning musings. I don't know why it seems so meaningful today...