The Old Mill

This is the Old Mill located in Gloucester County adjacent to the Skating Rink. I would have taken a more representative shot from the front which shows the mill wheel, but I didn't feel like dying that particular day. Route 14, a major thoroughfare and one of the few roads leading out of Mathews, runs right in front of here, and these days if you stand on the side of that road you can expect to become flattened in a matter of seconds. I don't feel like being flattened. Yet.

This old mill, conveniently called Old Mill, has been here forever, hence its name: Old Mill.

(How's that for a redundant, superfluous and ridiculous sentence? I can come up with 'em all day long. They spew forth effortlessly.)

When I see it, I am reminded of my grandmother's sister. She once told me a story about a horse and buggy ride she took which, due to rain and an overflow of the mill pond, involved plenty of slipping and sliding up the hill towards what is now Ware Academy, formerly Gloucester Day School for those taking copious notes. The horses got stuck more than a few times and it was quite the ordeal. Of course this was in the days before paved highways and ubiquitous automobiles.

(It truly pains me to confess that I am old enough to have had a close relative who lived in the days of the horse and buggy. It's official, I am ancient, as in as old as the Old Mill. Excuse me while I tie a cinder block to my ankle and jump off the end of the dock. Or, I suppose I could just go back onto the side of Route 14, take a picture of the better view of the mill, and wait to be flattened.)

My mother, an artist, has painted at least four pictures of this mill prior to its present state of decay. Just recently she was talking to someone who mentioned that he owned one of those four paintings. I need to find out where the other three are and steal one. I can do that from my own mother, it's written in the handbook called What You Can Do and Get Away With: The Family Edition. (Other titles in that series include The Work Edition, The Parenting Edition and The Relationship Edition.)

Speaking of my mother, at my request she wrote a story about the skating rink, since she also skated there, along with every other Mathews, Gloucester, Middlesex, and King & Queen County resident currently between the ages of 35 and 154.

I'll put her story up tomorrow. Right now, I have to block out that whole horse and buggy thing.

Route 14, here I come.