Marvels at the Carpeting

It’s lovely out.  We may as well have a class out doors.  My bike ride took me north today, and on the return ride home I always forgo the trail and ride back along Old Huguenot Street.  Starting out by Garvin’s late eighteenth century farmhouse, besides the trail, you come upon one or another older building, a sign, for an African American burial ground, another cemetery, back off from the road, which has been afforded a sign, by the New York State historical society.  Eventually one turns with the bend in the river to the dense collection of old buildings, some of which remarkably stand from the late seventeenth century. 

So today, I lobbied for having class out along this road. We’re up to Chapter Ten in our “American Pageant” text: “The Triumphs and Travails of Jeffersonian Democracy.”  I start each class, albeit today while driving over, asking them: “what did we learn about yesterday?  Names are usually more easily recalled than events or indeed failed constitutions like the Articles of Confederation and they pull up Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton.  I take the car a few miles up Route 208, as I want them to take the same path I did and soon we’re pulling into the old farm house at Garvin’s  It’s closed, of course.  No one is serving anyone food just now.  But it isn’t hard to imagine this building standing here, on this lawn, some two hundred and thirty years ago. 

I park the car by historical library.  No one is around and I do my best to capture their imagination about the Louisiana Purchase, and Louis and Clarke and Tousaint L’Overture and all the other critical events of the early part of the nineteenth century in America.  Over at the main welcome center, which is closed, there are some people on the porch whom we automatically avoid.  There’s a wigwam on the lawn.  No one can understand how it was they bent that bark that stretches over the top.  I started to say that these were nomadic dwellings, but caught myself as I don’t believe these Lanape did much migration. 

The simple, square Walloon Church was built in 1681.  No one is comfortable walking across the graveyard.  Do you remember the Belgian family we met on the dahabiya in Egypt?  Remember our friend Jacques from Beijing?  They were French speaking Belgians.  Walloons were French speaking Belgians. I walk up to the door, knowing it will be closed, and try to have a look around the back of this remarkable old building. 

Walking back to the car, the girls are up ahead and my wife and cut across a field and notice a patch of lawn that is covered in purple crocuses.  And as they turn the corner to meet us near the car everyone marvels at the carpeting and decides to take pictures. 

Friday, 3/27/20