The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You’re married to a historian, you live a part of your life in the past. This vacation we’re in the mountain town of Index, population about 150. Yesterday we got the full tour of the Historical Museum and its Annex from the town historian. Plenty of mining tools, crosscut saws, old toasters, pieces of the Post Office, kraut cutters — about what we got half of at home. Not exactly like viewing the aqueducts of ancient Rome, more like a postcard of early life on the South End when we were the pioneers.

History is a tough sell. Not many folks tour these museums. And those that do whip through, skip reading the captions on the black and white flood photos or the loggers square dancing on a 15 foot diameter fir stump. Most of it looks like Grandma’s old house they visited as kids. A few folks come to find Grandma’s house — or at least a small record that their family actually lived in this hick burg. Genealogy they’re interested in, the history of the area, not so much.

Our own Museum, like the one here, draws virtually no one the one or two days they’re open. Even most residents are devoid of curiosity, a little busy raising kids and paying the mortgage on the subdivisions outside the newly annexed city limits. Way of the world, I guess.

We’re zooming headlong into the future, technology accelerating, AI no longer on the horizon, it’s right here right now and dragging us along. There’s no time for lolly-gagging about what was when last month feels like the distant past and tomorrow fills us with dread. Doomsday scrolling, not old histories, fills our time. We don’t have time for the old stuff. What’s in the rearview is definitely not closer than it appears, it’s way far back, almost out of sight. And most definitely out of mind.

So I don’t mind a few days spent here in the past. More and more it’s where I live. Just one of the benefits of living with a historian.