Ebenezer Griswold, Bennington, Vermont
One of the things that precipitated
this notion of a long walk is the prospect of our selling our family
home. This year it will have been in our family for 60 years, and I
have lived here for much of that time. The question of where to go
next is a very real one, in both a figurative and a literal sense.
Has this house held me back in my life? Or does it propel me forward
in some way? Where do I really want to live? I have ended up here,
and I've made a good life for myself, for the most part, but I don't
think it's the life I might have made if I had had any kind of clear
idea of what I wanted to do with myself.
So this walk is a way of embodying the
central question of my life: Where am I going? Where am I going to
end up? And it's all of a piece with my life that the route I have
chosen is fairly arbitrary. I chose one ancestor out of all the
hundreds of people who contributed to me, and chose to follow his
path. Ebenezer Griswold. The reasons for choosing this one person
are:
- Surname: We share it
- Locations: It stands to be a fairly attractive walk
- Length: It seems manageable for a person of my age and level of fitness.
- Starting point: It turns out that a major part of my ancestry comes from Norwich, CT, on both sides of my family. My mother's side was deeply rooted there for a couple of hundred years. There is a greater aggregate of family connections there than anywhere else.
Other than that, it's pretty arbitrary,
and that seems to be entirely in keeping with my tendency toward
aimlessness.
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