Another American Adventure: Recycled Dreams

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Recycled Dreams

From a shop on the Soap Derby street in Ambridge PA ...

John almost bought this for me ...

And then this building, that attests to the rich and diverse ethnic character of this area ...

2 comments:

BarbaraJune 2, 2012 at 4:51 PM
I visited an antique emporium in St. Jakob's (near Kitchener, Ontario in the Amish area) and could not believe seeing stuff I was familiar with from my childhood being sold as antiques. Scary thought. I guess that makes me an antique, too.
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beth cioffolettiJune 3, 2012 at 7:45 AM
Yeah, pretty scary ...
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.