Blog Your Blessings: Walking Down 200 Years

I joined my daughter and her class on a field trip around the historical sites of our little town of Woodbury this week. She is one of 20 lively kids who managed to hold relay races; pick flowers for sweethearts; discuss the gummy bear qualities of calamari, the trouble of planting irises sideways, and seasonal allergies; and get every trucker to honk his horn yet managed to safely walk down the road and two hundred years back in time.

We visited the Glebe House, the birthplace of the Episcopal Church in America. There the first bishop was selected from among Connecticut clergy and later consecrated in Scotland in an effort to preserve the traditions of this faith without lugging around the political baggage of loyalty to the British crown. That was an important consideration and a form of health insurance for Anglicans during the Revolutionary years.

We checked out the Glebe House kitchen with its rope bed up against the wall, apples drying along the fireplace, and pewter chargers. We did not touch anything in this house on a street that was once one of the richest in America.

We listened to a storyteller as she spun some local yarns that kept all of us in rapt silence for half an hour on a hard-as-nails wide-board floor. We checked out one of the town's four remaining one-room schoolhouses and learned that all the kids shared germs by drinking from the same bucket of water supplied by whoever lived closest. The biggest kid tended the fire. The older kids tutored the younger ones, and children used soapstone to write on their slates because paper was so dear and chalk was nowhere around.

Recess back then was unsupervised and perfectly safe because there was no road full of horn-honking truckers out front, only grass. We learned that kids kept their horn books with them all the time so that they could fill every possible moment with learning. That horn would have come from cattle, and it was also used for holding gun powder forming a drinking glass. Call it colonial plastic. It was everywhere and ever so durable. You could drink out of a 250-year-old horn glass if you wanted; it wouldn't leak. .

Times for practicing reading might have popped up between serving adults their meals, clearing the table, fetching water, knitting, sewing, mending, helping with the animals, and, at long last, tightening the bed ropes for a sleep-tight-don't-let-the-bed-bugs-bite kind of night atop a mattress full of corn husks or pine needles or what have you.

And of course they showed us the graffiti in the window of the Glebe House and on the walls of the schoolhouse. Old graffiti in places that make history is venerated, I learned. In fact, when the old schoolhouse was restored and the clapboards replaced, the men who rebuilt it recreated some old graffiti so new generations could imagine what the wall might have looked like carved full of initials, the work of young, unsupervised pen-knife artists at play. Were they special, the letters that started the names of the kids who had gone this way before?

I think so.