Profound Thoughts

I found out from my daily infusion of book news on Shelf Awareness (sign up for the new twice weekly readers' newsletter to find out what's new on bookstore and library shelves!) that a book on why we must settle Mars will be discussed tomorrow on Science Friday on NPR.  My visceral reaction was "Why can't things be the way they always were?"  And then my brain adjusted and my second thought was, "How is that - the way things always were - when nothing stays the same?"  There is the sum and total of my profound thoughts for the day.

I've discovered that if you do something the same way twice and it is successful, everyone involved remembers it as "we always had marshmallow fluff fights on the Summer Solstice!"  Oh wait!  That is a brilliant idea.  Plans are underway for a Marshmallow Fluff "fight" for June 21st, 2012!  Mark your calendars, NOW, boys and girls!  Details to be announced.

Now where was I?  Oh yes, profound thoughts...  My brain is wired to be nostalgic for the oddest things, sunlight on the hillside where a house now stands.  I will never relive that particular day, when I was twelve, and I looked out the kitchen window and saw the late afternoon sun on the tall grasses on the hillside.  So much has changed since then.  There is an addition on my parents' house that blocks the view from that window.  Someone built a house on that hillside.  I am a little taller, much heavier and a whole lot grayer than I was decades ago.

But someday someone else will look out the window of that addition and become nostalgic for the way the light reflects in the windows of that "new" house.

The class of 2001-02 pose!

Last week, my husband and I visited an old grist mill - Illicks Mill - not far from our home.  It is being rehabilitated as an "environmental education center" by the students of Liberty High School.  When I was in high school, teens, mostly from Liberty, and a handful of adults who led and motivated us, rehabbed that very same building as a coffee house and entertainment venue.  Bob Thompson was our guru and the driving force behind this movement.

Back then (in the late 1960s) we felt like heroes because we cleaned out years and years of pigeon poop and we put in safe floors and windows.  Back then we could not believe that we collected enough money to put in bathrooms on the ground floor.  The mill race and its entrance and exit were still in place all those many years ago.  We planned on using hydroelectric power from the water wheel.

Trains pass on the OTHER side!

We bought day old donuts at the Mohican Market on Broad Street and sold them for a dime - or was it a nickel? - a piece as local folk groups played "500 miles".  We sang "Freight Train" whenever the trains roared by not 20 feet from the side door of the mill.

Now there are elevators and separate rest rooms and handrails and beautiful paintings on the thick wooden beams - (at least they appear to be unchanged) - and safety doors and... As we walked down into the basement, the former home of the mill race, a young woman chirped out, "There's nothing down here.  The sale is outside."

"I'm reliving my childhood", I told her.  And then I added with undue pride, "I was the treasurer of TRIM for two years",... as if, she would know or even care what TRIM (Teens for the Restoration of Illicks Mill) was.  And then I explained to my husband, who was not lucky enough to grow up here, all about the Mill race and the iron grates.

The smell of old stone and moss is still the same.

Nabokov has his spiral marble, others have their cups of tea, or blue glass bracelets.  I have sunlight on long grasses and the smell of old stone to take me swirling back to a time when things were, as I believed, "the way they always were".  And even then, I was changing the way things were and the way things became changed me.

Profound thoughts, ahhh.  Now, who is bringing the Fluff catapults next year?