We spent our first day in Concord exploring more of the Revolutionary history of the town. We drove to the rental car place in a neighboring town and picked up our car in the morning. We had been alarmed by tales of how scarce and expensive rental cars had become, but we’d been able to find one for a price that was pretty normal. In the late morning we strolled around Concord, learning about its history, visiting burial grounds, and just enjoying the pretty downtown. We went to a large farm stand not far from Leslie’s house, called Verrill Farm, to get lunch and supplies to help with dinner. I’ve heard stories of Verrill Farm for decades – Leslie’s kids worked there during the summer, and lots of people in the neighboring area get beautiful locally grown produce there. They are quite an establishment now, with a beautiful airy building, a fresh produce section, a sandwich counter, a deli counter, tables of pies and baked goods, and many other displays of local produce and locally prepared foods. After lunch we went back into Concord to visit the Old Manse, a house lived in by resident ministers and their families, which had been built in 1770 for Reverend William Emerson. Rev. Emerson who was the father of minister William Emerson (same name), and the grandfather of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. The house was very close to the Old North Bridge, and in fact Rev. William Emerson had watched the fight from his fields while his wife and kids had watched it from the second story windows of the house. The older Rev. William Emerson was the town minister in Concord and later a chaplain in the Continental Army. In 1776 he went to the troops at Fort Ticonderoga, but died on his return home. His widow married again, to Rev. Ezra Ripley, who was the next minister in Concord. He served as minister, living in the Old Manse, for the following 63 years. In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord and boarded in the Manse with his step-grandfather, Ezra Ripley, his mother, and his brother. He wrote the first draft of “Nature” there, an important work in the Transcendentalist philosophical movement. He eventually married and he and his wife moved to another home in Concord. In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne rented the Old Manse, with his wife, Sophia Peabody, as newlyweds. Henry David Thoreau put in a vegetable garden for them as a wedding gift. The Hawthornes lived in the house for three years while he was a struggling writer. Sophia was a gifted painter, but gave it up early in their marriage. She and Nathaniel etched poems onto the glass windows upstairs with her diamond ring. They had three children, and eventually moved to another home in Concord to continue raising their family, where they were neighbors and friends of the Alcott family. We took a tour of the Old Manse. It was a GREAT tour, thanks to a great guide! Our guide was very knowledgeable about the house and its history. He gave an interesting and informative tour, and was able to answer lots of question, including an obscure question about the wallpaper! The fact that he could talk knowledgably about the wallpaper, where it had come from, how people got wallpaper in the 19th century, and this history of this particular wallpaper, said a lot about his depth of knowledge about the house. He showed us where Sophia Peabody had etched poems on the window with her diamond ring, talked about a taxidermy owl that Hawthorne hated so he kept hiding it in the attic and she kept bringing it down, and about one of the women of the household who would teach young men from Harvard who would come to stay at the Manse – she was considered a Harvard professor in all but name. After the Manse we drove to Lexington, along the route of the British soldiers retreating from Concord. We stopped at the Minuteman museum on the way, which was very informative. The British were shot at all the way back to Boston. Each skirmish is well known, with names given to different sites (like “the Bloody Elbow”). The names and activities of each farming family along the way are known too – one man did not participate, but the museum was careful to note that this was because his wife had just had a baby. The detail with which everything is known about this retreat is incredible. Every battle has texture like this, with individuals firing weapons at other individuals, moving tens of yards from one piece of cover to another, and reloading, and taking shelter with other individuals, and exchanging bits of information… but this information is almost always lost to history. But not this time. This museum collected, saved, and exhibited every bit of information and piece of physical evidence that it could about this famous battle – the circumstances leading up to it, the events, who participated in the events, and what they did -- so that we actually do know an enormous amount about exactly what happened. After the museum we drove to Lexington to get a Covid test for all of us. We’d been in Boston during the Provincetown Delta outbreak on Cape Cod. We’d watched the growing numbers with some alarm, knowing that doubtless it was spreading to Boston while we were there. But it had been quite difficult to schedule a test while we were in Boston… most available slots were far away and we didn’t have a car. So we scheduled one in Lexington on our first day in Concord. This difficulty was an instructive glimpse into how hard it would be for somebody without a car to just get to a testing site. For people with cars and flexible schedules, getting a test was an inconvenience that might take an hour or two, but for those without cars or with a rigid schedule it could range from extremely difficult, taking a half day or a whole day, to impossible. The test was uneventful. We did the drive through, got five kits through the car window, and we each did a Q-tip up the nose and packaged it appropriately and handed it back through the window to the pharmacist. Our results came in within a day or two – all negative! Then back to Leslie and Bill’s for a delicious dinner and lots of conversation!