Last Sunday I made a visit to some new neighbors down the block.No specific in mind, just an opportunity to sit at the kitchen table, have some tea and chat.As I did so, it occurred to me how rare the Sunday visit has become. When I was a kid in New Jersey of the 1960s, Sunday visits were routine.Most stores were closed, almost nobody worked, and the highways, as a result, were not desperate steeplechases they have become today.My family normally traveled eight city blocks to the home of my grandmother, where adults would sit on the front porch and chat while we children played hide-and-seek. The Sunday visit was something to desire strongly.It was the repetition to church, our reward for an hour of devotion, an opportunity to take advantage of the fact that Dad was not at work, we were not in school, and there was no housework that couldn't wait until Monday.Sunday was, indeed, different from the other days of the week, because everyone seemed to be on the same schedule, which means that there was one day when everyone seemed to have time for everybody else. Sunday as a day of rest is, or was, so deeply rooted in the culture that it's surprising to find that, in a short span of time, it has almost entirely lost this association.In my childhood, it was assumed that everyone would either be home or visiting someone else's home on Sunday.But now the question is, "What do you plan to DO this Sunday?" The answer can range from going to the mall, to participating in a road race, to Montreal for lunch.If one were to respond, "I'm making a Sunday visit to family," such an answer would feel strange, which sounds like an echo from another era. I suppose I should be grateful to live in Maine, a state of small towns, abundant land and tight relationships.Even though folks work as hard here as they do anywhere else, the state's powerfully rural feature still keeps at least remnants of the moral of yesterday's America, where people had to depend on one another in the face of economic vagaries and a challenging environment. The writer's general impression of the Sunday in the past was a day when  _  .
everyone was paying a visit to some relatives far away everyone seemed to be free for others Dad was not at work while Mom was busy cleaning the house nearly every adult would go to church and children weren't at school