There’s no place like home

Looking back, I should have seen the handwriting on the wall. Born in Binghamton, NY, I spent my formative years on the banks of the Susquehanna River, catching crawfish and trapping tadpoles to observe their transformation into frogs. My family and friends spent idyllic summers at Seneca Lake where, as kids, we picked grapes for extra spending money and stargazed endlessly, wondering what the future held.

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‘All the old friends’

Each October my friend Becky and I take a morning to visit the fall wildflowers. “All the old friends”—the ladies’ tresses (a slender, wild orchid with a pungent, spicy fragrance), the deep blue bottled gentian and dry, wooly pearly everlasting. Stiff gentian, rarer locally than the bottled species, was thriving this year along the moist banks of Peas Eddy Road in Hancock, NY.

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