Dear Readers,
Some of you know what a light-hearted little sprig I am, and how all I yearn to do on a chilly morning in beautiful Tamworth is provide a modicum of entertainment to brighten these solemn columns. (And how many of the younger set understand the origin of the use of the word "columns" for wodges of text? Oh, wait, is "wodge" too English English, or I am being safely mid-Atlantic?)
Well,. I think you might be warned already that I am happily digressing this morning as I look out on early March here and reflect for the thousandth time that the daffodils and crocuses are nodding their pretty little heads in balmy England.
Last year in my nature notes here I was still muttering about the white stuff in mid-April, so memories of February daffs up by train to London from the Scilly Isles just beyond the toe of England are really not going to help.
Ancient civilizations ? Oh, yes. Future archeologists will of course be armed with underground radar and other tech of a sensitivity we can only dream of, but even so it may take a while before they discover the unlikely sites of several puzzling settlements buried deep in our local woods.
In the good old days of Outdoor School at Tamworth Learning Circles around the turn of the twenty first century.there was a project of which as a teacher I am quite proud. The kids in groups had to brainstorm and invent an ancient civilization, create a site with artifacts and evidence of various kinds which would reveal aspects of the culture,religion, way of life, art etc.- and then bury the site, speeding up the processes of the centuries. Then the groups would move round to a virgin buried site and excavate it, trying to figure out the evidence and come to what conclusions they could about the nature, customs and cultural universe of the people who had lived there.
I was very excited by this project, and I think the kids were too - I wonder what their memories of it are now, twenty years on. One wonderful legacy of it is that I don't think that the sites were completely explored! So there are still fragments in the ground out there, as there are millennial time capsules in the wilds of Sandwich. Recalling these and other stories of TLC which I haven't included in the history of those twenty five years, I feel immense gratitude to the families who entrusted their children to us for the experiences we could offer them. The perfect examples, physical and virtual which can exist as a parallel pair in only a very few minds and even there in the shadows of memory, are the pyramids of Tamworth - a one-millionth volume scale model of the Great still in Wonalancet, aligned with a home-made compass and the Math sweated over by eight/ten year-old minds, and the other a stretch of road outside our house, carefully measured as a actual side -length at Giza and soaring upwards in the imagination into the New Hampshire sky. We didn't quite manage the three million blocks of stone, but, hey, we built a rocket to the moon and our stories wandered among the stars. Young humans are good raw material, it has always seemed to me, and they can show off that potential quite often given the right circumstances, or even, I find, against all reasonable expectations. Any bunch of kids anywhere can build the pyramids, invent new civilizations and any math required. We hope to capture some of that richness in our TLC history and website, which we are addressing in earnest. Tomorrow - the world !
Richgard Posner
