Sights unseen

For years now, we've been driving by this dilapidated old schoolhouse, which must have been built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and I've always wanted to stop and take a picture. But that wish didn't come through until yesterday, when my husband and I set off on the motorcycle for a late afternoon photographic excursion.

I would have wanted to walk inside but there was no cleared path available and my husband most strenuously insisted that this would be a bad idea. "What if the thing collapses while you're inside?" It's stood for a long time, I reasoned, so that would be unlikely. An intense dislike of ticks dissuaded me more persuasively that it would be unwise to brave the very tall grass to get a peek inside.

There is something so sad about remnants of the past that are allowed to collapse on themselves. If it was, indeed, a one-room schoolhouse, as the tiny bell tower at the top suggests, according to my husband, wouldn't the people who were taught there want to preserve it? Wouldn't the county want to make a small museum out of it? There is an old schoolhouse replica at the fair grounds every year so why not maintain the real thing? And, if unwanted, why not tear it down rather than allow it to decay, unused and uncared for, in front of everyone's eyes? These are questions without answers, I know.

On a happier note, a turn down an unknown road revealed a pretty covered bridge, one of the many that make this region famous, poised over a creek. We stopped to take pictures and to rest before heading back home after our short adventure.

For me, summer is just beginning, although chronologically it may be nearly halfway done. The intensive three-week session I taught again this year ended July 1st, my husband and I marked my father's anniversary on July 2nd, my sister-in-law, her husband and kids visited with us from July 2-4, and on that Tuesday, July 5th, my husband and I turned 17. It's funny that it doesn't feel that long at all, which I guess is a very good thing. He still takes my breath away, that is how handsome he is!

On my desktop, I have still a few papers to grade for the summer program and I have an article to revise by Aug. 1 and I'm beginning to work on my book project as well, already planning a trip to Houghton Library at Harvard next month. All of it manageable, none of it a rush, like the pace of my life during the school year.

The best thing of it all is summer, with its clear blue skies and its yellow heat and even its sweaty humidity and pop-up storms and the concert of cicadas every morning, which announces another scorcher to come. Summertime is precious time, and I hope to mark every single day of this first relatively free summer. It has been long in coming though I know it will be quick in passing.