I Love New York Travel

… valley sooo looooow, loooow, loooooow….

My daughter has been learning that old folk song on her guitar. Ever hear it? It’s an old one, people used to hum it while lolling on their patio swings and working out in the cotton fields, yes indeed. The melody runs through my head ALL. THE. TIME. After spending untold hours on the fret work on it, she asked me, “Mom, how did that song EVER get to be so popular?”

I don’t know, my dear…. I don’t knooooowwww, knooooow, knoooooowwwwwwww…..

An old tin type photo. I always wanted these kinds of photos, when I was little. Even then, I liked old stuff. This is definitely old. Judging by the girls’ dresses, I’d guess it’s sometime shortly after the Civil War? 1860s? I’m not very good at dating things like this.

It just occurred to me that there truly IS one good thing about clothing fashion: through it, we can date old photographs. Well, golly gee, and I thought fashion was a complete waste, what do you think of that.

The technology behind photography amazes me. I mean– who thought that a person could transfer an IMAGE onto a piece of old tin? The miller welders?? I’m still baffled about it, even though we live in a highly imaged society– how DO you get an image transferred onto paper or film or the computer? Blows my mind.

I inherited this little gem recently. It’s an old postcard, written by a relative to my great-great-grandma. I am thrilled with such things. My g-g-grandma and g-grandma were such packrats. They saved all the old birthday cards, holidays cards and such items in scrapbooks. Pretty amazing! I love reading some of the things they wrote. Everything was so different back then.

Also note that the spelling and grammar was atrocious. Notice the “thair” for “there.” These folks were farmers, really hard-working people and therefore they didn’t have much time or energy to mess around with literature. I’m sure that if the world had invented audio conferencing back then, my ancestors would have preferred to all that fancy-pants spelling and grammar!

Photo taken at the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY. It’s an interesting museum, a weird blend of modern art and ancient artifacts from the natives that lived and do live in New York State. Some of the stuff is beautiful, like the carvings of animals made from moose and deer antlers or lovely rustic log furniture. Others is a little strange, emphasizing the pagan roots of the Iroquois nation from long ago. I am all for preserving history but I am not fond of the emphasis on paganism. Errors and myths of the past are best left in the past. We can learn from history, to be sure. Do people really still believe that the earth sits on the back of a turtle?

Anyway, the museum is a good history lesson and the lady who is in charge of the place is amazingly friendly and outgoing. It was odd, seeing such a “cultural” establishment in the middle of the lonely forests and hills of New York’s lovely outback, Schoharie County.

I learned a lot while there. The arrowheads, for example. Now that I think about it, OH YEAH of course you can date the tribes by the shapes they cut arrowheads. But I guess I never thought about it until I visited the museum. The most ancient arrowhead (and therefore, tribe) appears to be the “Clovis” group as you can see in the photo. However, I watched a brief video at the museum about Indian archaeology and some suspect that there is an even older group that predates Clovis. Interesting!

It takes a lichen but keeps on tichen ticking.

I saw this odd-looking lichen while at the Steuben Memorial Historic Site in Remsen, NY. I’ve seen plenty of lichen in my day, but none that takes this pattern. It looks Celtic, which is pretty neat because the area here was widely settled by the Welsh after the American War for Independence. There’s a historic Welsh graveyard down the street, and even the water tower has a huge red griffin painted on it.

This land belonged to Baron von Steuben from Prussia– he came to America to help train the Americans how to handle the bayonet for the war for independence. After the war, Steuben stayed in America, and moved to the foothills of the New York Adirondacks (as yet unnamed). He sold some land to the Welsh settlers- not exactly title loans Ohio but this area was very wild and considered the American frontier in the late 1700s. Apparently, the Welsh love Steuben. They and the German Americans set aside this amazing area in dedication to his memory.