Reflections on Place and Relationships in Environmental Change
As part of the new course “Environmental Humanities and Global Health” introduced by Professor Kimberly Theidon in the Spring 2021 semester, Fletcher students were encouraged to engage the emergent trans-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities in analyzing and developing responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas that require the collaborative work of diverse scientists, medical practitioners, engineers, artists, lawyers, and other across a variety of fields.
For the Class Finale project, students chose an environmental issue affecting them, their loved ones, and their communities, and wrote a series of three papers directed to particular audiences in varying tone, style, medium, and genre.
In this finale, MALD student Kelsey Rowe offers a personal recollection and reflection on the environmental and human changes in her hometown.
Where I Grew Up
By Kelsey Rowe
I – Harleysville
when I was growing up
we heard so many stories
my mom grew up on a farm
her childhood narrated our bedtime
we heard about the time
when she went to get the mail
as a two-year-old
and got lost in the grass
we heard about the time
her dad slapped his pants
and a mouse fell out
the time my mother and a friend wandered off
and were found at the top of the hay mow
which I’ve seen in farm stories so much
that it seems like a normal kid thing
the time the swinging stall door froze
because the bull liked to stand under it
and scratch his back
and it was so cold
the poop he left when he went outside
was frozen by the time he came back in
my grandfather had to jump in the stall
and chip away at the poop
jumping back out every time the bull charged the door
my childhood was full of stories of that farm
the pond
the trees
the cows and horses
the dogs
the gardens
the work
I never saw it, even though it’s in this county.
it’s a neighborhood now.
they cut down all the trees
tore down the barns
and put up a hundred copies of the same house
sometimes I wonder how that changed the water table
those acres went from supporting from one large family,
their veggies and cows and horses
to a hundred small-ish families with pets and swimming pools
these ‘modern’ developments weigh so heavily on the land.
I grew up in a house
that was never a farm house
where I played with my brother in the woods
and in the creek
we built forts and watched tadpoles
we sat
walked
looked at six-inch waterfalls
fought with pricker bushes
and wondered if what we’d just picked was aloe
now I’m living at home again and I realize
that’s not actually woods
it’s a strip
a creek with a couple trees on either side
running from our mailbox to our neighbor’s barn
to the bigger creek down the hill
but it’s not woods
it hasn’t been woods for centuries.
when German settlers took this land they also took out the woods
cut down trees like they wanted to get rid of the sylvania
the Pennsylvania Dutch lived here for a few centuries
farmed this entire corner of Pennsylvania
turned this area into tracts of land
that got divided up
and turned into housing plots
when farming wasn’t profitable anymore
there are trees
but I don’t think they can talk to each other
I don’t think they can work together
to prevent insect attacks
to fight off spotted lantern flies
and anyway, they don’t have parent trees
making sure they don’t grow too quickly
and sometimes branches break
trunks split
or the deer rub their antlers too hard
on the young trees
stripping the bark off
but we have yards
yards are important
you have to have one
and so we do
Read the rest of Kelsey’s finale project by downloading the PDF below.