I took this photograph last Sunday just before we went to get our Christmas tree.  I’ve been thinking about what makes a person feel at home, safe, secure.  I’ve always known that the place where I feel the safest is Rowe but I started thinking about why Rowe does that for me.  It’s because very little changes.  Sure the faces have changed over the years, the zoning, the politics but very little else.

This is Adams Mountain.  It’s a small mountain – elevation 2,110 feet.   This view has really evolved over the past five years or so.  Bill has done a tremendous amount of work to clean up what was once a pasture.  The only time we can see it from the back yard is when the leaves are off of the trees but I always know it’s there.

In May of 1961 we moved to Potter Road in Rowe.  At the time there weren’t as many trees as there are now and the trees that were there were much smaller.  You could see Adams from the house.  I started school in the Town Hall that year but moved into the new elementary school in the spring of 1962 and you guessed it, the school was right across the road from Pelham Lake and Adams.

All the time I was growing up so much of what we did had Adams in the background.  School, the beach, Old Home Day, the library, the town hall, everything you did had it in the background.  In the summers many families in town would sponsor a Fresh Air kid from New York City.  I remember once one of them asked me as they looked at the mountains and hills around them, “How do you get out?”.  I always thought that was a funny way of looking at things, I felt secure, they felt trapped.

I think it’s good to be attached to something so solid.  It has evolved ever so slightly over the years but all changes have been at the hand of man. I think of everyone who has ever lived in this house, worked this farm, made a life in Rowe and they have all had the same view.  Sometimes that’s difficult to wrap your head around.   Adams has been sitting there for thousands of years and I like the idea that my family, potentially for generations could be looking at the same thing from the back yard.