In the moments before dawn fully broke on Sunday, I found myself awakening on a fine spring morning. Two rescue dogs were asleep on the foot of the bed. Through the slightly open windows the pleasant sounds of cardinals chirping, mourning doves cooing, and other songbirds were shattered by the shriek of blue jays.
It is in moments like this when the mind wants to slow down in the place where the present becomes the past before it eats the future. We are fortunate to live in a place where peaceful moments are there to grab to let our minds wander across a stream of consciousness.
In a college town like State College, the summer arrives in the first days of May when the semester ends the normal parameters of the school year. And autumn arrives in the last third of August when students return.
There is a fountain-of-youth quality to living here. No matter how the years of our life advance, there will always be 50,000 people here that are somewhere on the age spectrum of 17 to 23 years old. But the rest of us must continue to age.
And college towns that are scattered among rural communities around the country have been an oasis of stability in a landscape that was hit decades ago by the economic changes of that advancing new world order.
In the 1970s and 1980s of our youth, factory closures shipped jobs overseas from small towns in Pennsylvania. A college town like State College escaped the changes. Employment remained steady because universities could not close to move halfway around the world chasing cheaper labor.
But it is important to remember how tightly knit the fabric of our college town is with the communities near us. People come to campus every day from places like Tyrone, Bellefonte, Lock Haven, Huntingdon, Warrior’s Mark or Clearfield. The university operations would grind to a halt without these people coming here each day.
And all around us are some of the things that make living here so incredible. The explosion of colors from the gray skies and brown grass of winter is a burst of life starting once again in the spring and early summer.
The mountains are green again, the creeks run higher and the slower pools of limestone creeks have their surfaces broken with the rise of a trout. Boats go back into lakes in Bald Eagle State Park or at Raystown. Flowers are in bloom, particularly the omnipresent yellow dandelions. The hills and streams and lakes and small towns of Pennsylvania have a comfortable feel to them. People are friendly, they look out for one another.
And on that Sunday morning the memories flowed back from summer days long passed. A day at Stone Valley or at Colyer Lake or a trip to Hershey Park meant packing up a green metal Coleman cooler. You always packed a cooler because this pre-dated Sheetz and their MTOs dotting the Pennsylvania countryside.
In that cooler were chipped ham or bologna sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, the juice of the homemade bread and butter pickles on the ham sandwiches soaked into the bread. And the drinks were sixteen-ounce glass returnable bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew or Hires Root Beer that we opened using the built-in bottle opener on the side of that cooler. Bags of Snyder’s of Hanover sour cream and onion chips were opened and devoured in minutes.
Stone Valley meant canoeing across the lake, hiking around the lake or trying in vain to catch even the smallest bluegill or sunfish. Those days we’d throw the Zebco rods and reels bought at Kmart in the back of the van. For bait, we’d stop at the gas station in Pine Grove Mills for a styrofoam container full of dirt and large nightcrawlers. But the ultimate goal for most of us was to avoid crossing paths with any and all snakes, regardless of their venomous or non-venomous status.
Summer family gatherings meant the clank of metal horseshoes, the cheers of a volleyball game and the wary competition with the dangerous lawn darts — a game so dangerous it was banned in 1988. And occasionally as a kid, if you were smart enough, you sat down to talk and listen to uncles, aunts, parents and grandparents. Memories now of so many long-passed relatives make me long for one more summer day like that.
As darkness fell, the smell of a charcoal grill was still in the air, and with it the hope that the hot coals would last long enough to roast marshmallows on the end of sticks we’d gathered as the summer night became a firefly light show. Invariably the evening would end with gooey messes of melted marshmallows creating a laundry-time nightmare for our mom.
Above it all was the hope that these summer days would never end…
