I grew up in Baltimore County with a Tom Sawyer upbringing… we lived right next to a huge woods that went for 15 miles. We had a Swiss cowbell and my folks would ring that when it was time to come home. There was no question about safety… we didn’t lock the house, left keys in the car. My grandfather was a farmer and a mountain man who lived in Gettysburg that his family settled in before the Revolution. He told me stories that went back to 1820; showing me the charcoal pits in the Blue Ridge Mountains when it was the western frontier, before coal. He told me of the horror his family suffered during the battle of Gettysburg – his grandfather was in the Union Army and his family had to hide in the basement of the schoolhouse during those three days of hell. From Grandpa, I learned the value of keeping our old people in the community, passing on the culture orally, not in Disney movies.
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