People don't think much about Pennsylvania. It's ordinary.
We have ordinary hills and ridges not alpine mountains. We have ponds and lakes, not the wide sea. We have ordinary animals like deer, foxes, and, yes, groundhogs. We have ordinary plants like daisies and goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace.
We have robins and hawks, ducks and herons, just ordinary birds, except wood ducks, those showoffs! We have farm fields and woods with little wildflowers, meadows and the sort of neglected places that wrens and voles like.
We have cities and small towns, highways and back roads and of course all kinds of people, including some who ride in buggies and live in the old ways. Ordinary. Remember, Centralia doesn't even have smoke coming up through the roads anymore. (I always meant to go see it. Oh well.)
Four seasons with a summer that's stiflingly unbearably hot and a winter that's unbearably cold and long. In between them are beautiful spring and autumn but they're short with too many gray rainy days, well, rainy if you're lucky these days, I guess. What could be more ordinary?
Dawns full of birdsong and evenings with golden light and long shadows and, for a couple weeks in summer, fireflies. There's nothing fabulous about Pennsylvania. It's quiet, almost cozy.
You can rent cabins in the Poconos. And out near Hawk Mountain there's a B&B that's an old brick one room schoolhouse near a farm with peacocks, lambs and little donkeys. Okay, that's a bit cottage core but still ordinary. Pennsylvania is the kind of place that everyone overlooks. No wilderness like the Adirondacks or the Great Smokeys. A few coyotes and bears but no wolves or mountain lions.
But the thing is, I absolutely love ordinary. I must have been born in the right place. I could walk around the rest of my life looking into quiet corners at ordinary things. And I'll keep taking pictures to show them to you.
