I get off the Interstate as quickly as possible to avoid the New York toll roads. Within minutes the landscape transforms into rolling hills intertwined with snowdrifts of varying heights. Here towns aren’t called towns, they are villages.
Villages lost in time, in an area known as the Finger Lakes.
Villages established in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Buildings that hold stories of hard working men and women, raising families, farms and fearing God.
Today many of the structures still remain, although uninhabited. The peeling paint and splintered wood tell stories of their own however. I stand in the bitter winter wind to listen.
I hear the musical calling of those early settlers of this land, feel their strength and triumphant spirit. A connection of the human condition to explore, wonder and question…..