Fountains

..A good look at this photograph tells a lot of tales.  Mom brushing the face of her youngster after a drink at the fountain on Main Street.  Main Street itself as a dirt road.  The brick retaining wall that exists to this day, the dome of the old opera house, even a few wheel tracks.  Pretty swell stuff and not a parked car in sight.  We are guessing that this scene is about 1910, what with the telephone poles and all.  100 years ago seems so distant.  If you were alive then, say in your middle 30s you were born closer to 1776 than to today. Think of that. Our father was born about the time of the picture and his early years were closer to the civil war than to the years when we were in high school...a fulcrum if you will; a teeter totter date dividing up the ruler of years.

Fountains are great things in a village.  A common meeting place of sorts where people headed on a hot summer day with the promise of an answer to "Mom! I'm thirsty!".  They were also landmarks in a village where everyone knew where it was and if they wanted to meet up later they would say "meet me at the fountain at 4pm".

We note with some dismay that there isn't a water fountain to be found in our entire Village and that is sad.  There can't be a picture taken of a scene like this again.  Pretty soon, depending on the year that fountain was dismantled, there might be no one around still alive who saw it in action.  Pretty soon thereafter the fulcrum in the yardstick of life will balance out so that no one will have been around closer to that 1910 fountain than to day.

It is, of course, crazy to attach such sentimental value to a fountain that, if it still existed, would have cause countless fender-benders and taken up precious parking spaces.  It isn't out of the question, though, to think of a mom, dressed in her long black dress and snappy hat, bending over her child, dabbing a chin after helping him or her up to the magic fountain that made thirst go away.