Why do I do this to myself? I'm back in my "Pilgrimage" mood. The family genealogy gets us back to 15th century France, and the French family name persisted to my great-grandparents. The offspring from then on were all female, except, I imagine, for far-flung cousins unknown to me, and the heritage ran from then on to English/Irish and . . . one German grandmother Wilhelmina, pictured here as I imagine her.
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I look at these old wrecks of thick stone walls with the huge blackened hearths and the gigantic overhead beams and the oddly placed asymmetrical windows, and I want to be there. I want to smell them. I want to see that sunshine on old stone steps.
Those thick stained planks charm me.
If only I had a gazillion dollars to buy one of these old places and restore it. . . or even to live in it as is, with the damp and the mice, moldy rushes on the floor.
[Heavy sigh.]
The truth is, as Abe Lincoln pointed out in one of his responses to a fairly recent post, time is like away . . . there's no such thing.
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8 comments:
I do the same thing with castles and cottages in Ireland and Wales. I think we might be related--that picture of what you envision to be your German grandmother bears a striking resemblance to my Austrian Grandmother........
Oh, I'll work my way around to Ireland and Wales. Apparently my ancestors went to Wales a century or two later...
You had me agreeing completely, until you mentioned mice underfoot!
Oh well, Wanda...they're very small and wouldn't eat much. ;-)
In the old farmhouse where I spent the earliest years of my life, one of my going-to-sleep-accompaniments was the sound of mice skitchering through the walls, so I might not be so averse to their presence as others who hadn't had that experience.
Then we could very well be related. We seem to have similar bloodlines. What a hoot!! Let's agree now that, if we should have common ancestry, neither of us will feel compelled to do retroactive gift-giving to make up for lost time!! We'll just call it even and go on simply admiring one another. Deal?
Deal, Baby!
(Grenelle? Cartulet? Keeler? Leggett?)
Uh oh..............Keeler...........Hmmm.......
I've had the self-same yearnings. Although, not so much in the last 4 months. Hmmm....wonder what the shift is about.
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