Time travel

This last week I was off attending a cousin's wedding. Even better, it was at a beautiful old manor house in Somerset. What a location.

Everything about these places whispers about ages gone by and people who lived very different lives than our own. And it reminds me that my own house is over one hundred years old. The first family who lived there didn't worry about how well Wifi travels through brick. Their spare time was definitely not spent the way I spend mine, chatting via webcam to Canada and studying current publishing trends with Twitter. Ah, no.

But they may have put books on the built-in shelves in the bedroom, like we have. They would have cooked family dinners in the kitchen, same as us. And they would have sat together on cold rainy nights and I dare say they might have drunk the odd cup of tea to warm up. There's crossover in our lives with the lives that came before us.

Alas, unlike Vonnegut's Trafalmadorians we cannot see all time at once as we might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. We see it in pieces and it's difficult to step back and see these pieces without forgetting that we're a part of them. Some day some other family will live in my house, and maybe one hundred years from now they'll wonder about this time. I'll be a ghost without a voice, but that won't matter. It's their wonder that will inspire them.