I am reading an amazing book right now called Half Broke Horses by Janette Walls who also wrote the Glass Castle, both being true memoirs of family. If anyone is looking for a book to read
quickly I highly recommend either book. I love reading memoirs, travel writing and a gripping story that displayed culture of different times and places. I’ve been reading aloud to my husband as we clip away at the Pennsylvania highways to return to our home in New England. Several things that we have discovered in reading both these books is that our kids are way way coddled and spoiled and live in the lap of luxury. Second is that we are grateful we didn’t live in the wild west growing up or during the time that these books were portrayed. I vicariously have been a homesteading rancher for 3 days reading this story. But like all good books do it’s made me see things with a different perspective for the time being...and here’s whats cooking up in my brain.
Everybody chooses to live or move on from where they grew up for different reasons. It’s also interesting to hear how places change over the years. Both my hometown has changed and the town in which I live has changed for the locals that have remained here since childhood. Trees grow, they are cut down, developments are made or things torn down, road widen to make way for more traffic or areas by passed and drain all business away from a once thriving business district, shopping centers are built and family owned shops close down after generations of success. In the book I’m reading it talks about the development of the west and how the over grazing, lack of water, drought and dust bowl almost regularly did family ranches in and not to mention the changing perspective of what “progress” was for the nation at large. Cars, airplanes and electricity all changing our culture.
When I was a young child I loved the woods behind my house. I spent a lot of my free time with my friends building tree houses or hiking through the winding paths with my dog Blondie. We also loved playing flashlight tag and in winter sledding down the pipe line which was as steep as a ski slope. Creeks were clean and I spent time making dams and looking for crayfish. We were untethered compared to some children now and the outdoors without Wii or computers were our main source of entertainment. When big bulldozers came to clear those woods away for the development of new construction of homes that are now the more desirable homes that people crave I felt a grave injustice had occured to my neighborhood and...myself. I mourned for weeks the forest that today is completely filled to the brim in my hometown with McMansions. I sat every morning that summer eating my cereal and watching them rip all the trees out and I felt like chaining myself to the trees that I loved to climb. Do one of those tree hugging protests like out in crazy California or Washington State. I started really identifying with conservationists and those hippies that lived in redwoods for a year to stop the loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
There many things I loved about growing up where I did. But even now, everytime I return home there is another strip mall, a new chain restaurant, and the highway is much much wider to help the progress of people moving out of higher taxed and dense areas. There are no sidewalks, the farmland is at this point mostly developed now with new constructed homes, I’ve never seen anyone in the few local parks and nothing is a walkable distance to anything and there is no public transportation. On a recent discourse with another hometown fogie I made a joke about some cultural aspects that I always saw as funny about PA. It didn’t go over very well with one person in-particular...to which it was not meant to offend however it hit a raw nerve with someone. Point is that I never felt that I “fit in” with the culture in my hometown white collar upper middle class suburban expanding sprawl. I was an animal lover, conservationist who didn’t see the need to hunt deer or bear the day after you eat your fill of turkey on Thanksgiving and I certainly didn’t understand or could have cared less about sports...especially football. I was artsy fartsy and I love the ocean and the overstimulating excitement of the melting pot of New York City’s mixture of cultures. I also loved working farms and dreamed of living on a farm one day myself. I love the Amish...to which I still occasionally threaten! I have always had a hunger to experience other cultures, and different ways of life and a very wide variety of diverse people. So I just will say what I have to say....suburban sprawl is souless. Do we all need to be so damn close to a Panera Bread and a Starbucks? When a community values new construction over smart sustainable community planning it rips the soul out of a part of that place if it ever had one to begin with. That’s what happened when those bull dozers did when they ripped my childhood “playground and park” and poured cement in the name of progress. This is the scar that will never lead me back to my hometown. The same thing happened to me on 911 in New York when I watched my beloved city wounded. Not all hurts come from people. Progress looks different to me and this is why I live where and how I do. It’ important to preserve land for our children, it imperative to plan for the future and health of our neighborhoods by providing safe routes to school and natural spaces for discovery. It’s not utopia by any means, but I must commend the town I live in for spending years of investment into our now future. It is a unique place to live with a lot of character, soul and vision of how to preserve our values well into the future.
quickly I highly recommend either book. I love reading memoirs, travel writing and a gripping story that displayed culture of different times and places. I’ve been reading aloud to my husband as we clip away at the Pennsylvania highways to return to our home in New England. Several things that we have discovered in reading both these books is that our kids are way way coddled and spoiled and live in the lap of luxury. Second is that we are grateful we didn’t live in the wild west growing up or during the time that these books were portrayed. I vicariously have been a homesteading rancher for 3 days reading this story. But like all good books do it’s made me see things with a different perspective for the time being...and here’s whats cooking up in my brain.
Everybody chooses to live or move on from where they grew up for different reasons. It’s also interesting to hear how places change over the years. Both my hometown has changed and the town in which I live has changed for the locals that have remained here since childhood. Trees grow, they are cut down, developments are made or things torn down, road widen to make way for more traffic or areas by passed and drain all business away from a once thriving business district, shopping centers are built and family owned shops close down after generations of success. In the book I’m reading it talks about the development of the west and how the over grazing, lack of water, drought and dust bowl almost regularly did family ranches in and not to mention the changing perspective of what “progress” was for the nation at large. Cars, airplanes and electricity all changing our culture.
When I was a young child I loved the woods behind my house. I spent a lot of my free time with my friends building tree houses or hiking through the winding paths with my dog Blondie. We also loved playing flashlight tag and in winter sledding down the pipe line which was as steep as a ski slope. Creeks were clean and I spent time making dams and looking for crayfish. We were untethered compared to some children now and the outdoors without Wii or computers were our main source of entertainment. When big bulldozers came to clear those woods away for the development of new construction of homes that are now the more desirable homes that people crave I felt a grave injustice had occured to my neighborhood and...myself. I mourned for weeks the forest that today is completely filled to the brim in my hometown with McMansions. I sat every morning that summer eating my cereal and watching them rip all the trees out and I felt like chaining myself to the trees that I loved to climb. Do one of those tree hugging protests like out in crazy California or Washington State. I started really identifying with conservationists and those hippies that lived in redwoods for a year to stop the loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
There many things I loved about growing up where I did. But even now, everytime I return home there is another strip mall, a new chain restaurant, and the highway is much much wider to help the progress of people moving out of higher taxed and dense areas. There are no sidewalks, the farmland is at this point mostly developed now with new constructed homes, I’ve never seen anyone in the few local parks and nothing is a walkable distance to anything and there is no public transportation. On a recent discourse with another hometown fogie I made a joke about some cultural aspects that I always saw as funny about PA. It didn’t go over very well with one person in-particular...to which it was not meant to offend however it hit a raw nerve with someone. Point is that I never felt that I “fit in” with the culture in my hometown white collar upper middle class suburban expanding sprawl. I was an animal lover, conservationist who didn’t see the need to hunt deer or bear the day after you eat your fill of turkey on Thanksgiving and I certainly didn’t understand or could have cared less about sports...especially football. I was artsy fartsy and I love the ocean and the overstimulating excitement of the melting pot of New York City’s mixture of cultures. I also loved working farms and dreamed of living on a farm one day myself. I love the Amish...to which I still occasionally threaten! I have always had a hunger to experience other cultures, and different ways of life and a very wide variety of diverse people. So I just will say what I have to say....suburban sprawl is souless. Do we all need to be so damn close to a Panera Bread and a Starbucks? When a community values new construction over smart sustainable community planning it rips the soul out of a part of that place if it ever had one to begin with. That’s what happened when those bull dozers did when they ripped my childhood “playground and park” and poured cement in the name of progress. This is the scar that will never lead me back to my hometown. The same thing happened to me on 911 in New York when I watched my beloved city wounded. Not all hurts come from people. Progress looks different to me and this is why I live where and how I do. It’ important to preserve land for our children, it imperative to plan for the future and health of our neighborhoods by providing safe routes to school and natural spaces for discovery. It’s not utopia by any means, but I must commend the town I live in for spending years of investment into our now future. It is a unique place to live with a lot of character, soul and vision of how to preserve our values well into the future.
