I suppose all history, by definition is ‘old’, but in the case of our new/old home and neighborhood, the word ‘history’ takes on very personal meaning. This is not only the place where I grew up and the woods in which I played, it is where my grandfather was instrumental in founding a communal arts and crafts community at the turn of the last century. It is where that group of young idealists built a number of stone bridges to crisscross the small neighborhood ‘run’ and where they dammed the stream to form a swimming pond deep enough to skinny-dip. Just downstream and nearer to my grandfather’s old house, the run joins a creek that once powered a snuff mill built by white landowners in the 18th Century and alongside which the Minquas Indians carried furs to the young city of Philadelphia a century earlier, and where abolitionists built Underground Railroad tunnels before the Civil War. My grandfather. My woods. Old history.

This summer I took my grandkids to play pooh-sticks under the old stone bridge closest to the mill, the game I played some sixty years ago - and I suddenly realized that these boys were the 5th generation to walk these paths and cross that bridge, just as their dad had done on his summer visits to my parents’ house just up the hill, just as I had done, playing in the woods, and my dad on his walks, and my grandfather in his own back yard.

I am continually surprised, some nine months after moving back, the emotional impact this old history has on me. To live again at the edge of these woods, to stumble upon these well-worn bridges - I cannot explain the sense of belonging that maybe I have not felt any place since leaving home and ‘moving on’ some fifty years ago. Through luck and good fortune, it turns out, I have come full circle in my life - older, if not wiser - and I feel blessed to wander through these woods today and cross the bridge toward home.