I Miss Old Things

Recently, a local high school and it's surrounding community celebrated it's 100th anniversary.  It was in the paper, there were some celebrations, I believe some historical markers may have been placed - or at the very least, talked about.  It's a decent number of record, especially in an area filled with brand new everything - new roads, new houses, new strip malls, new lights, new, new, new.

I grew up in a town that was founded before the United States was - 1664.  Just a couple of generations after those pilgrims landed in Plymouth and the British set up shop in Virgina.  I never really gave much thought about it when I lived there.  There weren't any celebrations in Eastchester about it that I recall; perhaps after the first 300 years they get blase.  When that town turned a century old, there were some other things on its plate at the time - a revolution a-brewing, so to speak.  There's a now defunct quarry in the town from which marble was unearthed and transported to Washington DC to build monuments and many of those vast, enormous edifices of government.  There's a house down the street from the high school that we would tour as it was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  A one-room school house from circa 1835 still stands in stellar condition.  Finally, there's St. Paul's Church, built in 1765, which is now technically in a town called Mt. Vernon as time has changed some things - a place where George Washington directed the parishoners to bury the tower bell, that was cast in the same foundry as Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, during the Revolutionary war to protect it from the British (so they wouldn't melt it down).  Rumor has it, that at one point, the town was used as a temporary capital of the US during the Revolutionary War, though I can't seem to find much to back that up - but I do remember hearing that somewhat frequently when I was a child.

Considering the harsh winters of New York, so much has weathered so well over time.  But of course, things were built to accommodate the climate and were certainly built differently back then - built to last.  To endure.  To hold memories and secrets within. 

As I grew older I developed an affinity for things old - for gravestones, tilted with time, for wooden double-hung windows with exposed pulleys, for thick oaken doors that now sit sub-street level because of the development around them.  I loved to come upon stone fences that still run through forests or old stone pump houses tucked into greenways, grown over with moss, mother nature reclaiming her property. I would give all of these things their own stories, since I didn't have anyone to tell me their true ones. 

I miss those things. 

Of course, after a trip to Europe my perspective greatly changed on what was considered old.  Tour after tour of church after church after ruin after church of buildings and structures erected hundreds to thousands of years before made me blush at my wonder of my local history.  It was all so overwhelming for so many reasons I almost shut down and at one point I said I just couldn't do it any more.  

I did go to a musical the other day in a theater that has been continuously used as a civic building of some sort or another for that same century as the high school.  The current proprietors are very proud of the history of the building, as they should be, but for some reason, it just didn't seem that old.  It didn't feel that old, or smell that old.  You could have told me the place was 40 or 50 years old and I wouldn't have doubted it.  But some of that I suppose has to do with the climate.  Even with the hurricanes, rain and lots of sunshine are easier on things than hail, snow, and ice.  Just ask all the folks who move down here. 

One day, I suppose things here will get that old, but instead of staying, many will be replaced since, as I mentioned before, things just aren't built to last - even with the milder climate. Perhaps they'll stay on the same foundations, or within the same property markers, but since they were put up with limited funds, or in ways to save a dollar, you won't be sitting in the same seats within the same walls as your predecessors from centuries prior.  You won't peer out the same windows that watched history being made.  

Because of time and natural erosion, Florida has lost much of it's land, where the first peoples settled thousands of years ago.  So much of that history is lost to the depths of the Gulf and to the Atlantic, whereas up north, beneath the stone structures of our European history, lay millennia of life, with their own sacred stories to tell.

I suppose its up to us to create that history for here.  My neighbors and I...from my street to my town to my county...we are making the stories to tell. Someday, we'll be the stuff of the old things, since the "things" we make today are so limited in lifespan.  And maybe, just maybe, someone will miss us.