Yankeeland in the Fall

Image by kansasexplorer 3128 via Flickr

I head home to rural PA in just a few weeks.  When I say rural, I'm talking not even a stoplight or a grocery store within the hamlet limits. True, everything one needs is just up the road. Despite the abundance of options once one leaves said hamlet, it's still pretty feudal.  Ok, I exaggerate.  It's not quite feudal. But an example of how rural we are, you say? On the last day of school (or is it the day of graduation?), all of the teenagers who have one, ride their tractors to school.  Yes, you read that right. What's that? You mean like the common lawn-tractor variety? No. We're talking John Deere, Buhler, New Holland, and Massey-Ferguson. Tractors that cost almost as much as my grad school experience. This has been tradition since at least I was a little kid, and I'm sure it goes back further than 30 odd years ago. In the last 10 years or so, our rural area has been threatened by the apocalyptic growth out of a neighboring city.  More and more transplants have been venturing into Yankeeland instead of paying more and being closer to work.  Every year, these BMW, Audi, Jaguar, and Lexus drivers have been raising a ruckus about the one day a year that they need to share the roads with a vehicle that cost more than theirs.  I'm convinced it's a "What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine" mentality.  Meet any of their children and you'd agree. Entitlement in spades, these Gossip Girl kids. They also happen to be the same drivers who don't have a clue how to navigate ice and snow (both the parents and the kids). However, since graduation has come and gone, I won't be enjoying this little small town tradition anytime soon.

One that I could enjoy would be the township fair. I started going to this insanely great (at least I thought so when I was 8) fair as a kid with my best friend. She was cool, we could run wild within certain bounds, and there would be dust up my nose for weeks afterward. All in all we were good kids, even through high school, so I have no coming of age drinking-beer-and-smoking-anything story here.  Sorry to disappoint if that's what ya'll expected. But every year, like lemmings, she and I would go to the fair at least once.  We rode rides that were constructed on site and should have flown apart by all laws of physics at the first tremble. Maybe they were held together with chew spit, mashed popcorn and Bubbalicious? We'd go to ALL the stalls, walk through the barns, smelling the cows, the horses.  Petting the rabbits through the cages.  Avoiding the chickens and roosters at all costs. We even attempted to educate ourselves with a spin through the bottom of building where they held the dinners.  There you could find science projects, gourds the size of my little brother and art projects.  Oh the art projects! Paintings, drawings, needle point, knitting, latch hook, pottery.  Yep, it was a veritable Carnegie in there. But the crowing glory, the apex of the whole experience, the point of existence during the this week every year is the FOOD. Food that is magically transported from an era where deep fryers existed in every kitchen and dumpling shaped women made, well, dumplings. Home made french fries, funnel cakes, corn dogs, lemonade that is more sugar than lemon yet houses an excess of tartness, gyros that drip with yogurt sauce and make you want to emigrate to Greece. Oh the food. I think I've missed this fair 5 times since I was around 8 years old. Who knows...this year, I might wear my cowgirl boots. They'll compliment the powder sugar from my funnel cake nicely.