I just came back from the past. Okay. Not really, but as close as anyone ever could. I spent a few days in Colonial Williamsburg. I go there quite often and I am always wondering when will the magic fade. It hasn’t yet. As soon as I set foot in the cobbled sidewalks of that reconstructed historical town, I am immediately transported to another time. A simpler, yet complex time in history when America was still a baby country, trying out its legs and learning to walk on its own.
This is a place where the past mingles with the present and where it is clear to anyone paying attention how things change and yet stay the same throughout time. Sitting on a bench a colonial couple–obviously gentry by the clothes and the richly decorated parasol the lady is carrying–converses with a modern couple in jeans. A colonial woman walks down the street with a twenty-first century mug of coffee in her hand. A couple of tourists cross paths with a group of militia men heading to a drill.
I have a dream of one day sitting under my favorite tree in Williamsburg, a giant with branches that reach into the ground as if trying to hold on to reality, and write.Hard to explain that yearning to my husband, who is not a writer and does not feel the magic of that place like I do. So I don’t explain and I don’t ask. But one day I will sit under those old branches and write while shadows of the past come into focus only to fade away around me.
As I walked down King St, for the last time this visit, I snap a shot of the young man scribbling away by the Post Office and the soldier playing the penny whistle. I stare with wanderlust at one of the many taverns in town and the little shops peppering the street.
My time in this time capsule is over this time, but I will be back. I wonder if they would hire me as a cast member and allow me to live onsite… Until next time, Williamsburg, I bid you farewell.
Author Natalina Reis 
Sounds wonderful. I know what you mean about places like this – wanting to be left alone to soak up the feeling of the place and get to know the bricks and mortar and listen to the stories they have to tell. Also love the image of the couple with the coffee. I once went to Bath Spa with my sister for a weekend. It happened to be Jane Austen weekend and the place was flooded with people in Regency dress. My sister and I, ignoring the culture, went on a ghost walk instead. At once point, around 11pm we passed the Georgian Assembly Rooms outside which were a lady and gentleman in Regency Dress. It was all a bit surreal until we realised that one was smoking a cigarette and the other was texting!
LikeLike
It is really easy to be carried away by the illusion of another time. Even those little inconsistencies cannot break the spell š I used to belong to a medieval re-enactment group and sometimes our “knights” and “ladies” would forget to remove their very modern watches, lol.
A Jane Austen weekend. That sounds heavenly considering I’m such a groupie.
LikeLike
I’m afraid my sister and I were very uncultured as we hadn’t realised it was on. We went to the Jane Austen museum and to the Baths but after that, as I say, on the ghost walk, which was either chilling or hysterical, depending on your point of view, but at least we were dressed for it. Among others there is a place in South Wales called St Fagans National History Museum which is a reconstructed Welsh village and there is also the Black Country Museum which recreates an industrial Midlands town. I would have loved to have been a re-enactor (English Civil War would have been my choice) but never got round to it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
š
LikeLike