Just about mid-August and it’s been so dry we leave footprints in the brittle grass and the ground has shrunk a half-inch away from the sidewalks. A couple of streets away, the locust trees are already in their October browns. But right here, the red maples are still in their glossy greens, although I see some scarlet blushing the canopy. Our Black-eyed Susans and sunflowers are enjoying their heyday, along with some johnny-come-lately Shasta Daisies.
I’m grateful for many healthful recreational and cultural opportunities this summer.
We’ve enjoyed a couple of healthfully engaging days lately, as we continue to recover from the strains and fatigue of long-covid.
On the professional front, each third Friday in July is National Park and Recreation Professionals Day, and my office was quite busy sharing the various promotions, tributes and recognitions across the state, as we honor the many behind-the-scenes workers who keep our parks and public facilities clean, safe, and ready to use. Now in its fourth year, and celebrated by thousands of colleagues nationwide, it is quite gratifying to see the worth of my original concept embraced by so many park lovers throughout the country.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts returned to town and campus with a big welcome after a two-year pandemic hiatus.
Carol and I attended a community sing-along in which Poppa & Picker, a guitar-banjo duo, accompanied the crowd in such old favorites as In the Good Ol’ Summertime, The Happy Wanderer, This Land is Your Land, Let There Be Peace on Earth and many other timeless tunes of generations gone by. And when we picked up on You Are My Sunshine, two little preschool girls in the audience, in all their youthful zeal and abandon, lustily belted out the song they apparently knew so well, enhancing the evening’s entertainment! The Orpheus Singers punctuated the singalong with a few of their own special selections.
(I noticed that the 20-something sound tech guy wearing his ball cap backwards, didn’t sing, but kept his face and lips pressed in a slightly amused arrangement, alternating with a thumb-tapping duet on his smartphone. He did, however, suggest we sing Will the Circle Be Unbroken.)
We just missed getting the last seats for an Improv Comedy show, but did attend the Essence 2 choir concert, strolled through hundreds of artists’ booths admiring their attractive wares, and enjoyed some Peachy Paterno ice cream from the Penn State Creamery. We took in a bit of a tour of the known universe with a planetarium program and stargazing on Davey Lab’s rooftop observatory.
We dined downtown amid the crowd of collegians and soon had our fill of them. One observation I wasn’t looking to make (but regretfully have): College women’s summer fashion can be described as revealing as much of the 4 Bs as possible—breast, belly, back and bottom.
We attended a State Theater screening of the highly entertaining 1920 silent adventure film The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks, accompanied by live musicians. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is the world’s only year-round, professional ensemble re-creating the syncopated sounds of early musical theater, silent cinema, and vintage dance. The director encouraged the audience to interact with the show the way our young grandparents did—hissing the villains, oohing the flirting romance, and cheering the appearance and ultimate victory of Our Hero! Upon the conclusion, the audience was “kindly invited to perambulate to the Egress” during the exit music.
Speaking of the arts, I was recently able to pick up an old pastime of mine: leathercraft. On Saturday, I finished refurbishing my father’s old axe. I replaced the broken handle, buffed off the rust, sharpened the edge, and constructed a custom leather sheath. Now to fashion one for its smaller version, my old Boy Scout hatchet.
We planned to attend the Cardboard Regatta at Welch Pool, just a walk down the trail from our home. Unfortunately, the race proceeded more quickly than our arrival, as the fun flotilla of 50 colorful cardboard crafts didn’t float for very long. We did witness the soggy remains, however. (Photo courtesy of Centre Region Parks and Recreation.)
Other honorable mentions from the weekend include, but without photo coverage, are the high drama of a pair ruby-throated hummingbirds duking it out at our feeder, and witnessing a sharp-shinned hawk raiding what appeared to be an owl’s nest, and carting away a squeaking morsel in its clutches.
The lawn is crunchy in our current dry spell, but our tended-to flowers are displaying their best blooms to the mid-July sun. And we’re grateful for the physical and mental health benefits, and the life-enriching cultural opportunities that public recreation offers us this summer!
Some of my strongest sensory memories are connected to my growing-up years.
Snow in the air before it falls.
Corn growing after the rain.
Leaves burning in the fall.
Honeysuckle in bloom.
Fresh-cut grass.
Some scents are permanently imprinted on our sensory memory. Some of my strongest are connected to my growing-up years on the farm.
Mown hay drying in the field.
Green walnut husks.
Cow manure.
Tomato vines.
Wet dog.
Freshly-tilled ground.
Rotting roadkill.
Our cellar’s ground floor.
Straw bales filling the barn.
Pond water.
But so many are also connected to people and events.
Old men’s cigars at the annual Family Reunion.
Wood smoke and canvas tents at Boy Scout camp.
First Grade “Teacher’s perfume.”
Crayons, Magic Markers and Play-Doh.
Charcoal grilling in the backyard.
Mimeographed worksheets.
The ointment for shingles on my five-year-old legs.
Pencil shavings.
Shoe polish.
Mercurochrome on my cuts and scratches.
Pine sawdust.
The springtime woods.
The childhood memories these assorted fragrances conjure are always welcome. What scents are some of your memory triggers?
A couple of scenes from a delightful Mother’s Day walk around Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center on this beautiful May day! Lake Perez, marsh marigolds and skunk cabbage, American beech buds reaching toward the hemlock canopy, redbuds blooming against a blue sky, Tussey Mountain and the rain-swollen Shaver’s Creek itself. Not photographed: a trio of snapping turtles, a ground-shuffling ovenbird, and all the rest of Mother Nature showing off her springtime garb!
the learning legacy of engaging peers in free-spirited, unsupervised outdoor play
Chapman Quarries is the smallest incorporated borough in Pennsylvania, with a population in the 2010 census of 199 people. It’s where my dad’s family was established, and where his dad, granddad, and nearly all his male relatives worked the slate quarries.
While I didn’t grow up in town, that’s where church was and where my cousins and grandparents lived and where I spent a good amount of time. And it was the only place apart from school recess where I was able to freely interact with a lot of other kids outdoors. Three childhood memories tell a connected story:
Ice skating on the dam. The nearby quarries both used and generated a lot of water, and before Hurricane Agnes’ flood broke it in 1972, the dam was an idyllic nook in the woods. All the kids would walk out the back of town down “the dam hill” to amuse ourselves on the frozen lake. (It was a good joke to tell the new preacher about “the dam hill!”) I wasn’t a very good skater and I remember my cousin Judy telling me that I spent more time lying on the ice than skating on it. The older kids would build a bonfire off to the side, and we’d spend the better part of the whole day freezing, thawing, and “just messing around,” as we called it, with never a grown-up in sight.
Skateboarding on Main Street. The town was founded on a great hill after slate deposits were discovered in the 1850s, which brought an influx of hard-working families from Cornwall, Wales and Devon to work the quarries. When the skateboard craze hit some hundred-plus years later, it drew all their young descendants to Main Street with short, metal-wheeled boards to mess around. (Metal wheels were the leftover technology from roller-skates, which took a special key to adjust on your feet. And—let me tell you—roller skating on uneven slate sidewalks just wasn’t even fun!) I remember my cousin Craig telling me I had to get a skateboard with clay wheels—they’d work a lot better and I wouldn’t be spending all that time lying on the concrete than riding atop it. Like sledding, we’d walk to the top of the hill and ride the boards straight down the center of town, pausing only when someone would yell “CAR!” The old folks in town wished we wouldn’t go so fast because they didn’t want to see us get hurt. But no one stopped us.
Swimming in Claude’s Pond. Deep, water-filled Fisher’s Quarry was the destination of choice for the older teen boys to go skinny-dipping and wash up when it was hot. (This had also been the common practice of all the previous generations.) But I had that opportunity only once, living out of town as I did. Instead, my pappy would occasionally drive me and my brother and sister and a couple of cousins to his friend’s farm pond where we’d go wading and swimming and messing around. The older teen boys would drive there themselves and bring a long wooden plank. They’d extend it over the deep end of the pond and secure it with one of their jalopy’s front wheels to create a perfect diving board. The bigger boys allowed me, as a non-swimmer, to take a few turns, and after some tentative jumps into the shallows, I ignored my own caution and jumped out as far as I could. I remember my cousin Robert hauling me out of the water, saying that I shouldn’t spend more time lying on the bottom than floating on the top.
I learned a lot from my cousins. And from going outside and getting involved.
Like mine, most Baby Boomers’ childhoods were characterized by the habitual frequency in which we engaged our peers in free-spirited, unsupervised, outdoor play. It was there that we learned leadership and cooperation in picking teams for a pick-up game, and creative problem-solving in building a treehouse over a creek. We exerted our bodies while managing risk, and stretched our imaginations while messing around. We discovered both ourselves and our places when we pushed our limitations and our possibilities. Our self-development sprung from self-reliance.
A copious body of research now proves what we then knew, but didn’t understand: that social interaction in connection to nature is essential for our physical and mental health and our intellectual and social development. May we extend that legacy to both encourage and enable it with our children—and theirs.
