the olden days

Recently my neighbors took me out to an "old church day" in the neighboring village, Alseda. Alseda is a small collection of old houses, a tea house, classic white-washed stone church, and farms, cut straight through the middle by the two-lane highway that has grown uncomfortably busy with DHL trucks and longhauls coming from the east coast. The church, a beautiful bright-white structure built in the 1700s, (so newish, relatively speaking) has green wooden pews and the most incredible acoustics. One can whisper on the far side of the dome, and another can hear that whisper bouncing up and dropping down like a ghost's or something from a psychotic episode. The all-seeing eye is painted in gold about the alter.

On this particular day, people were coming to church by horse and buggy, just as in the old days. Most of the folks driving buggies and wagons were as old as the contraptions they steered. Gaunt, bowed men in frock coats and bowlers, ladies in skirts and veiled hats. Most of the wagons had rubber tires, and they slowed traffic to a jam on the highway before they pulled into the church stable yard.

The yard was full of nostalgia. A regiment of the Swedish mounted calvary rode in, and everyone was busy unsaddling horses and unhitching wagons and getting the horses settled in the stable. The stable itself, my neighbor estimated, was about 200 years old, and entertaining to watch people do as others had done hundreds of years before.

The church bells began pealing before all the unsaddling and rubbing down was finished, everyone rushing to leave the horses stamping in their stalls and find a seat before the droning, calming voice of the Lutheran priest began. A very interesting morning.