Olden Days

Emily and I are talking about the past. We are sitting inside a cobblestone house built a century before the shopping mall across the way, decades before the invention of the automobile that brought us to the table where we are drinking my double-tall fat-free latte and her mocha frappaccino, years before my own grandmother was born. The house is still there because Starbucks saved it from the bulldozers clearing land on either side to make way for other shops.

We look at windows made of hand-blown glass, an original fireplace with bookcases on the side, wide moldings around the door, and we wonder about the lives that passed through what had been this front parlor before it held our table and chairs. Visitors must once have presented themselves at the front door, and tradesmen delivered goods to the back. What kind of outbuildings once stood nearby?

On what is now heavily traveled Route 96 between Victor and Pittsford, agriculture has given way to commerce, and unless the Starbucks sign above the portico turns heads, most passersby may not even notice this architectural jewel that has seen if not better days, certainly ones almost unimaginably different from our own.