Scythes, saws, hoes, old harnesses—the barn wall was cluttered with dusty farm implements from the past. As we strolled by, sipping the cold apple cider, we could almost feel the sweat on our own brow, feel the damp cotton and denim clothes cling to our backs. The past suddenly seemed to breathe in our imaginations and through us, becoming us, reminding us of how alien we are to that past.
If someone from years ago visited our new millennium, that person would see everyone with handheld phones, listening to commercials on the radio about how women can freeze their eggs, no longer using our hands to open doors at stores, walking miles a day for exercise, and, of course, there are so many other things. We are living the futuristic movies they made in the 50s and 60s.
When I think of the past, I think of faded daguerreotypes—those haunting, colorless eyes of our ancestors, our forbearers, the brick layers of this reality we are born into and grow up accepting as “life.” Those eyes seem steely, fixed with stares that are windows to souls now wandering the afterlife. These people have always known what we cannot.
We romanticize the dust of the things they left behind. We hang rusted tools on barn wall with handwritten tags and we try to imagine the life these people led. They inhabited an everyday world with no electricity, indoor plumbing, owned a worldview no wider than the edges of their property, existed in a quieter world. Today, we hear lawnmowers, cars, radios, televisions, engines of all kinds. We think these people must have been more patient; to them, though, it was simply the tempo of life.
I love visiting museums, historic sites, touching things that belong to a time that is forever lost. Perhaps that is part of the fascination. We share an earth with those before us. We literally walk where they walked. We look the same (except for the arbitrary fashions of the day), function the same; we are still human beings. And, yet, their “other” world, captured only in photographs, books, letters will never be the same as ours.
In the county where I grew up, there is old asylum that is now used as a museum. There are lunatic rooms, morgue rooms (that possessive a definitive chill), large sewing rooms. When you walk through, you can almost feel the energy of the past still humming on each antique carefully displayed throughout the old brick building.
I used to romanticize this past. I used to want to understand these people. I used to want to know—if only for a minute—what it felt like to be alive “back then.” These days, some of the romance has worn. Now, I see the dust for what it is. I see clutter. I imagine people who were probably much like anyone else, just waking up trying to get through another day. You begin to understand that the things on our own walls could just as easily be in a museum some day.
A hundred years from now, people might find a picture of you or an old pair of your jeans and try to imagine the life you led. Would it be romantic? Do our things really represent our daily lives? We are the past people will one day try to fathom, and we are the future people years ago could have never believed.
