Nonfiction: A History of Danby

One winter night in the woods behind my house a man named Joseph Soper sat down to rest against a tree and froze to death. His horses wandered off through the snowstorm until morning and were eventually discovered by Joseph Soper's brothers. They later found Joseph himself. Because it was the middle of winter, they buried him in a hollow tree near the spot where he died. Two hundred years later, I was born in a hospital twenty miles away.
"I lived comfortably in that world, which hadn't changed during my life and which I therefore assumed to be unchangeable."
I grew up knowing my home to be a cup-shaped nook held up by three mountains, with a river flowing out its eastern side to the world beyond. This cup was called Danby, and in my mind its borders were Four Corners Store, the Cabin, the Notch, and Brook Road. The land was made up of fields split by woods, most of them cultivated or grazed. Right in the middle was Smokey House, the educational farm where my dad worked. Its various outposts had names like Hilliard, Keeler House, Fisk House, and Herrick House. I lived comfortably in that world, which hadn't changed during my life and which I therefore assumed to be unchangeable. Even much later, when I had grown up a bit and had seen cow fields turn to stands of scruffy white pine, I still didn't realize how long the history of my town was. Generations of people had known the same land as intimately as me, though each of us might not have recognized the others' Danby as our own.