Time in as interesting thing, if it can actually be called a thing. When I was a child, the age of twelve was significant. Don't really know why. And thirteen - that is when I became a teenager. When I became sixteen I could drive! And then at eighteen I could buy beer. Little did I know how much of a problem alcohol would become for me. At twenty-one I am a bone fide adult (or so they say.) Back then no one trusted anybody over the age of thirty, so that was an age I wanted to avoid, except for the alternative to not seeing thirty! And on it goes. Now that I am sixty-two age looks quite a bit different.

Before I came to Clintondale I never stayed in one place more than four years - except for my growing up days, and then it was short stays - maybe six and eight years in Greensboro and High Point, respectively. Tomorrow marks twenty-one years. I have friends who have lived all their lives (to this point!) in one place, college excluded. Having been in Clintondale for twenty-one years I feel grounded, like I have a home, a place to be.

In May, 2001 my wife and I bought a little house in Oak Hill, NY, up in Greene County. In fact, that is where I am making this entry today. We look out our front windows and see the northern edge of the Catskill Mountains. Oak Hill, like Clintondale, is a small unincorporated hamlet. It boasted quite a little population back in the nineteenth century - not large, but having a barber, doctor, some stores, an ice cream parlor, a malleable iron factory, some farms. Then toward the end of the nineteenth century on up to the recent past, it went downhill. Many of the buildings in the hamlet became run down. Recently people like us have been buying and moving in. Oak Hill seems to be on the upswing.

Time takes its toll, but only if we let it. Time also builds up, but only if we let it. God has given us places and people to love and nurture and see grow. Clintondale and Oak Hill are both places where God has allowed me and my wife to have community and peace and joy. We've been married for twenty-six years, time well-spent indeed.