An instructor in English once said that nostalgia is the most powerful theme in American literature. One of the most potent sources of nostalgia for me is to drive through the many parts of New England where stone walls so laboriously built now divide forest into meaningless squares, and the cellar walls only remain of the years of labor some long ago farmer put into them building the long gone house and barn.. I have ploughed with horses, and given them a breather while I trudged with a frost heaved stone to add it to the wall. And thought of the now wasted labor my predecessors expended on the same task, now pointless.
