The few days I have spent in Vermont living in the stone house with my Haitian friend and her husband has given me lots to think about. We have had long conversations about why we do what we do and how we create our own identities. Do media and my total immersion into media help me create my identity or do I use media as a facade whereby my true identity is only revealed to friends and family. How do I see myself? My friend and I are both academics with writing credentials. We have families and responsibilities. We seek a life of continuing to learn and to write about our passions. Her passion is archeological. She took me to the oldest reef, which happens to be located on her island in the middle of Lake Champlain in Vermont. I saw fossils that are 480 million years old. The stone house she lives in may have been built in 1829 but the stones carry fossils that are dated back 480 million years ago. We both have a hard time wrapping our heads around that kind of time and looking at the fossils on the front of her house and putting them into a historical context. Our history changes with our perspectives. To see her house one sees a well-built stone house with a history. To see the fossils embedded in the stone of her house causes one to put the stones back into the earth and connect them with the tropical areas where they formed so many million years ago. I see the sea life swarming in the waters. I see their search for food and nourishment. Then I lose the path of their darkness under the waters, under the pressures of the glaciers, under the solidification of the material to harden and to remain so until man chiseled blocks of stone, hauled them on horse drawn wagons to build this stone house, to build the Brooklyn Bridge and to show the world where life once existed through the imprints of these fossils in the stone. I am in awe. My perspective of her house has changed forever. If I, by knowing the history of these stones, can change my perspective of this house, then by knowing my history, the history of my family, will that perspective change my identity? I will look to see connections of family history when I get to Ireland.