In everything there is a story.  Every person is a culmination of the stories of their own life.  Many unseen people have passed by or touched each object we see.   Most every place we can go, others have gone before us.  We tend to wonder about the homeless man with the sign at the traffic light collecting money.  We may ponder the origin and journey of items in an antique store or think of all the footsteps that have worn and polished the steps at the Lincoln Memorial.  An historian will speak of the stories a battlefield could tell and will spend a lifetime researching logs, letters, reports and other documents in order to be able to tell those stories.  Archeologists dig for any part of an object as evidence of the lives of a long forgotten culture.  A one inch broken piece of pottery can tell them so much.  Some psychics will touch an item and claim to receive impressions about where the object has been and who may have touched it before.  

When I was a little girl, I put a penny in my mouth and my mother said “you don’t know where all that penny has been!”  Boy, did that stir up my imagination.  Of course, only God really knows all the stories of all things in all time.  I am not an historian or an archeologist and I don’t think I am psychic.   I do happen to be insatiably curious and I have a tendency to day dream.  It would be very convenient for me if there were a guide book or, better yet, a kindly docent available to tell me the story behind everything I find interesting.  I love historical places and museums for this reason; there are stories to satisfy my curiosity.  What about all the places and all the objects with stories left untold?  Well, I just figure out what I can and imagine the rest.  Who knows, I might be right.

For instance, I walk along a trail and find an old stone bench overlooking a stream with a lush meadow beyond surrounded by hardwood trees and I immediately wonder who put it there and for what purpose.  I take a seat on the weathered but sturdy seat to ponder.  It may be a city park now but 150 years ago it belonged to a family whose young son served in the Civil War.  This was his favorite fishing spot and his father built this bench so that his wife could sit and enjoy fond memories of her son and enjoy the changing of the seasons while she prayed and waited for his safe return.   Of course, since then, at least a dozen young men, including the soldier, have proposed to their sweethearts on this bench and hundreds of little boys have skipped stones and fished on this bank.  Now wait, before the bench was ever built or a boy ever brought his fishing pole to the stream, there were generations of Indians who made the meadow their tribal home.  Before you know it, I can see in my mind’s eye the Indian girl who came here to be alone and day dream about all sorts of things.  All the stories of her ancestors and animal spirits fill her mind and she imagines that this is the very spot where her great grandmother met the owl who spoke to her and gave her wisdom to impart to her tribe.  She wishes the owl would come and talk to her now. 

Of course, I don’t know that those things really happened but I do know that there are countless stories that did happen and, given my limited knowledge of the area, I am sure that the cast of characters who have interacted with this very spot do include Indians, civil war soldiers, sweethearts and boys skipping stones.   Tomorrow, I may tell myself the story of the spinster sisters who ran a still deep in the woods and how no one ever suspected them.  But that is a story for another day…

For now, I walk down to the edge of the stream and pick up one of the thousands of perfectly smooth sun warmed oval stones and I skip it five times!  I wonder if that is an all time record and I hope that in another hundred years a day dreaming person like me will stand in the same spot and wonder who has been there before.  Maybe they will imagine that a middle aged woman stopped here to enjoy the view.   They might even guess that I had a big goofy dog that I walked every day along this trail and that, while he read stories in the scents of every inch of the trail, I told myself stories of Indian girls, civil war heroes, strong mothers, kind husbands, and owl spirits.  I hope they will walk down to the stream and skip a stone six times and smile with the unknowable knowledge that they just broke the record.