Here’s one of those posts that just got away from me.
I was going to talk about how, during the last week in August, on the only vacation trip we took all summer, how the gas went from $2.579 to $2.699 to $2.999 to $3.209 in four days.
I was going to say how well Lydia got along with the daughters of a friend of Carol;’ who she hadn’t seen in about seven years; the daughters look like:
this, and
this, and
this.
But what has still struck me, over two months after the visit, is the bizarre juxtaposition of agrarian and suburban life in another leg of the trip. One of my brothers-in-law lives in Chester County, PA, which is right next to Lancaster County. Lots of new suburban developments for people commuting, necessarily by car (unless they telecommute), to Philadelphia, close to an hour away. Not at all condusive to mass transit, with all the attendant ecological considerations.
I was most fascinated by bikers in gear that Lance Armstrong would covet on the same roads that the young Amish kids on their black one-speeds rode on.
The very week we came back, there was an article in Metroland on the agriculture wars, which says, briefly, that the people who move into the country want it to sound like the suburbs (no tractors at 5 a.m.) and smell like the suburbs (no manure!), but that if they want to move out there, they need to recognize that it IS working farm territory.
In the brief time I was in Chester County, I did not see the clash of cultures that was portrayed in the Metroland article, but I wonder if it’s just a matter of time.
