No Place Like Home?

What do you love about where you live?

Recently I was renewing my clearances—those hoops we need to jump through in Pennsylvania after the antics of Sandusky, Paterno, et al at Penn State made everyone who works with children a pedophile until proven innocent. One of the requirements on the forms is to list all the places you’ve lived.

It turns out that’s a lot for me. For the first 20 years, there were only three addresses: a roach-infested apartment on South Duke Street (my mother would hear them moving in the walls at night), 349 Lindbergh Avenue (no longer there), and another apartment farther south on Duke Street. Then when I went to college, the number of addresses exploded:

• 2 dorm addresses at Temple University
• 1 studio apartment in Columbus, OH
• 1 bunk at the arts camp
• 1 dorm in Berkeley, followed by a sublet room, a rented room, and an apartment in Albany
• A townhouse in Hazleton, PA
• A house in Charleston, WV
• A house in Greensburg, PA

Which brings me to my present location in Latrobe, PA. It’s a quiet little southwestern Pennsylvania town that is not in as bad a shape as many of the towns in this region are. The trains still go through (so we have Amtrak service), there’s a tiny airport (though with fewer destinations than before), and it’s close to major highways. And there are all the amenities for shopping and restaurants—or they’re fairly close by.

But the best part of Latrobe, not counting the Banana Split Festival, is the weather. We seem to escape the tornado watches and a lot of severe storms. Last winter, we also had very little snow (though that might be global climate change at work). And the temperature is moderate; of course there are very hot and occasionally very cold days, but for the most part it’s quite bearable.

We’ve been talking about moving elsewhere, and the discussion usually ends up talking about weather conditions attached to other possibilities: earthquakes, scorpions, extreme heat, extreme cold, tornados, hurricanes, and Republican politics. (The last blows colder than anything else.) And while we may change houses, we may want to stay in this area just for the weather.