The present of the past

What, you might ask, would a couple of semi-retirees need a day off from?
Themselves.
Call it what you want - downsizing, simplifying, getting rid of crap - we've worked hard at emptying the house and our lives of stuff that we haven't used in years and aren't likely to use. We've emptied the attic, moved our bedroom from the second floor to the first, and sent literally truckloads and carloads of stuff out the door and, most importantly, irretrievably away. The three bins of my mother's papers is now down to a six-inch stack of items to be scanned and sent along. We have a spare room that's holding stuff for the church flea market in June.
There's no special virtue in this. If we knew what we were doing, we'd have done it already.
But, back to that day off. On Sunday, we gathered up Lily. The next morning, the three of us went to Old Sturbridge Village. It was a fine day. We had a glimpse at life in the 1830s in America, a country on the edge of industrialization, decades removed from war, a time when life was hard but so very hopeful. (For a view of this exuberance, see Alexis DeTocqueville's Democracy in America. A new book, Tocqueville's Discovery of America by Leo Damrosch, was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times book review.)
With Lily reading the map and leading the way, we met with wool-carders and potters and printers, visited the school house, farm (listening to the ever-hungry lambs bleating for their mothers), homes, bank, stores, and church. We studied the post-and-beam construction and imagined what Adam's barn would look like in 180 years.

We, well, Lily, tried on clothes of the time.

We, well, Lily, got to clown around on top of replica cattle.
We were at the village for more than four hours on a sunny spring day. We gave ourselves over to the day and tried, as best we could, to look at the day in the way that a ten-year-old would see it.  There's no better vacation than that.