Pennsylvania summer, some observations that ramble back to childhood spent in other places.

There is the problem with not being born in Central Pennsylvania, not having it as my point of origin. (I’m from further North and according to my husband, stand around barefoot in the snow making giving myself chilblains in order to prove it.) Maybe it’s that we don’t share the gene pool or something, although, come to think of it, I did have an ancestor on my father’s German side that was born in this valley before moving west.

At any rate, here I am, an accidental re-import into this great agricultural valley, and everything bites me. My blood is better than that of the locals or something. Anyhow, I cannot step into the yard during the steam table hot summers at any time without an entire bottle of Deet sprayed on my legs, or in long pants—likewise sprayed in Deet. Chiggers—that bane of a barefoot kid’s life—are abundant. Other legs, smoothn or tanned, movie star gorgeous, are on every side, I am painfully aware that the flesh of my legs, scarred and seeping, resembles that of a 15th Century beggar, some wretched yeoman whose knight has died of the Black Death on his way home from the Crusades.

I feel an alien in my dealings with the air as well. In this coastal plain it is heavy. Not just with water vapor. There is also a mixture of air and water, in a heavy metal/soot rich smog, which may be seen gliding between the mountains every afternoon. There is also a daily and continual rain of particulate—a lot of it still coming down from the last century when this was a land of steel mills. The land to the north has been smashed with an industrial fist, mountains chewed up and spat out for coal. Everyone’s lungs pay.

Now come the questions about my rotten attitude. I can hear people yelling, “Move the hell away!”

I would if I could. Perhaps that’s why that ancestor went from PA to Kansas, although I can hear my New York State WASP mother snapping that no one would voluntarily go to Kansas. Whatever happened, most of the family lore has been forgotten. I am left only with lists of "Tooks and Brandybucks" and indications of where they were born and died. My mother’s family farmed in New England and then moved to the same kind of territory on the Upper Hudson, moving their cattle and sheep from one stony field to another. My father’s family wandered all over, from Georgia to Minnesota and everywhere in between, as if they could never quite get comfortable, but that’s another story.

Am I remembering childhood through a nostalgic lens? Was it really a place where the bugs in the grass didn’t bite so much and the air was so much cleaner, or am I kidding myself? Maybe I’m just getting older and more vulnerable—although I had those peasant beggar legs during my childhood, too. Those bites were not from critters in the grass, but from the fleas which infested our carpets and the dogs about equally.

My mother adored dogs and before the miracle of the chemical neck dot stuff, our house was alive every summer. The fleas, now that I come to think of it, bit my mother and father not at all, while they bit me and the dogs constantly. My father sprinkled flea powder in my bed and rub it into the sheets and over the carpet. Then, for a short while, the Spaniels, Shepherds and I could stop scratching for long enough to fall asleep.