Epilogue, ramble inn
A writer may define an epilogue as the end, or closure of a piece of writing.
I define this piece as a thank you to a person who shared so much information in a short time. Ramble Inn was the Pine Barrens. It was life, and living as it was in a period like so many in the region where it's children existed and carved out life as it needed to be for them. Whether distant or recent, this region has given us many lessons on how to survive and do so with dignity no matter what and this little bit of research I did accentuated that principle to me. Take your pictures, walk your walks, note flora, fauna, and monument, but please, always listen and closely whenever you run across someone from the region. They have so much to share that no book can compare. You can read about a bog, or a mill, or a community long gone but talking to someone who put their hands on the equipment, tasted the fumes from a stove after a day of harvest in winter, lifted bales of salt hay to a cart, poured a drink to a tired farmhand, hefted material for an earthen damn, or watched the birth of a child in back room of the town church... that's a treasure. Someone that can tell you about those sensory things that no book can convey, that's what you want to record in thought and in word.
A friend of the site and offsite let me know today of a loss.
Catherine "Kay" Neil Rossell, left us January 8, 2009, 85 years of age.
I feared this when last I stopped by.
She was my source, was the Ramble Inn, and all that made it so for 46 + years. This woman, so lucid and crisp in memory and disposition shared with me so much over two days in so many short hours a wealth that I keep, yet shared with you all.
She offered me in from the cold (actually scolded me in)as if we'd been friends for years and we talked and talked.
I spoke to her son this eve' for a bit. He told me she so enjoyed those conversations and chances are it was her last chance to share.
He said she really didn't complain much to the end and in meeting her I was not surprised. Complaining wasn't much of an option to the life she led.
If any of you enjoyed the information on the R/I in this thread, do not thank me or my mission to find her, but thank her in absence for her generosity in sharing with all of us what it means to be a part of this region.
Pay attention. Pay attention. Our elders have a great deal to teach us.
Thank you.
g.