Time Marches On

Just spent the weekend in a Inn/resort in New York full of family fun and relaxation. While there one can't help but notice the march of time.

My extended family has been going there once a year for over a dozen years now and while much is familiar seeing a place once a year shows time. The working farm that was once part of the inn has declined to garden plots for the family that lives there. The new tree-house built by the young teenager who lived there is long abandoned and a little decrepit, it's builder now a college graduate living states away with his wife and children.

Further afield and the old saw mill on the property which was once falling to shambles has new metal shutters and has seen repair and re-purposing as a storage facility. Not far from there along hidden by and overhang by a small water fall you can still see the slightly stylized carving in the rock face of the inn as it existed in the late 19th century, if the nearby waters don't wear it away that otherwise sheltered carving could outlast the inn.

There is an old gazebo now blocked with a warning sign that has had the names of youths and lovers carved in it for over 70 years , Ive done so twice myself, it probably will not be standing much longer.

A covered bridge stretched over the previously mentioned waterfall and a few hundred yards upstream there is was another wooden bridge that I once walked on (careful) that is now gone and the fading trails that led to it are barely visible. Further away across the property is another broad stream where one can find the decrepit stone footings of a bridge built over a century ago, nothing remains of the wood that once spanned the water there and no clear trail leads to it. If one wanders out from the stone remnants of that bridge a nearby hill has a gentle incline that slowly reveals an old road that climbs along a ridge that stretched away along a local river, a road to some center that people have built new routes to over time or simply forgotten.

The inn itself , revealed by photos on it's walls, has grown from little more then a house with a kitchen attached to a sprawling building an other outlying buildings with several dozen rooms. No one who vacationed there before the civil war would be able to recognize the place today but to a modern eye the place looks old and quaint.

There are many little secrets on those grounds, old foundations, long over grown farm plots outlined by stone walls, soot smudges in little caves along the brooks that are decades old.

It's one place a charming country Inn and the march of time can be seen all over. How much more would there around a thousand year old temple or "lost" city?