The other night Bobby and I were chatting about this and that and somehow the Appalachian Mountains came up. Embarrassingly enough I couldn't really remember which states they even went through. Bobby grabbed his phone to look it up and I shouted "WAIT!" I made a quick dash to the living room and grabbed our world atlas. We flopped down on the bed and slowly flipped through the pages and found what we were looking for. We studied the map, looking at all the thousands of towns and cities, the winding roads and highways and the jetting mountains that dart across the United States.
I relished in these peaceful moments with my husband, exploring the map with our pointer fingers and laughing at some of the ridiculous city names.
Its not that I'm anti-technology, but I worry that children today will not know these simple moments of turning real pages, of taking more than five seconds to discover an answer, and to smell that dusty, sweet smell of old books.
Our atlas was published in 1970 so there are some countries that no longer exist and we spent awhile trying to find the differences.
(We did get the phone out a few times to compare the African countries, just to see what has changed!)
Going through the different countries, it made me remember that we are only a small blip on this blue and green planet. I laid there wondering who lived in this tiny mountain town or along that part of the Nile. Its nice to step out of my little sheltered life once in a while and imagine what the rest of the world is doing on a Tuesday evening.
It's always good to have map skills. I actually like looking at maps too.
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