Trick or Treat

This time of year people become a little more curious about supernatural happenings – going on in strange and normal places, looking for a sign or some kind of message , that to this point may have gone unnoticed as we live in our own worlds.
It seems appropriate that on Monday of this week I took a call from Harrisburg Area Community College, that informed us of a class offering with five people signed up for it, the class name “Dating Your Older Building”. The four people who showed up for the class were eager to learn what to look for when trying to determine the time period of a building, how the region influenced what materials were best to use in their construction, how prosperous the community was, trends in the style of architectural detail that notes an era in our collective built history. Many of the earliest homes no longer exist, as they were intended to be temporary, what we see today are second homes that were built to last.
Before the call we were unprepared, by the end of our class time, Chuck and Danielle had presented a capsulized examination of house history and had engaged the ‘students’ in discussion
beyond our nine o’clock ending time.
When you pause and look at our built environment you can begin to see past the shadows of what is accepted as ordinary and notice the nuance of the story in our homes, tell tale signs…just waiting to be discovered.