“What am I down here for again?” It was 1975. Beaver Falls, PA.

My mid-20’s parents had their first home, three kids, a silver Vega in the driveway, and a hole in the backyard where my little brother and his buddy Clayton used to “dig to China”, keeping them out of trouble and within earshot of my mom’s kitchen window, lest our neighbor’s doberman Rommel break his lead.

It was nine steps down from that kitchen to the basement cupboard where mom kept all the vegetables and fruits she’d canned for the season. Mason jars filled with corn, peaches, peas. She’d sent me downstairs to get something that, a mere six seconds later, I could not recall.

Hearing my shout, she leaned onto the landing and, I can only imagine, shook her head.

“Green beans, please.”

I dug around through the shelves and preserves, eventually locating the floating green stalks. I’d lope up the stairs victorious, glass jar in hand.

(Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.)

Like the overeager hand of a first-grader, memories like these kept springing up unbidden last weekend while visiting another small Pennsylvania town: Gettysburg.

It’s friend Hannah’s birthplace. Just like Beaver Falls set the stage for these kinds of memories for me, Gettysburg did the same for Hannah, before life took her to the Netherlands these last two decades. It’s one of the reasons she’s running a semester-long DIY study abroad program for her three kids. She’s immersing them in all things small-town-America, while also giving them a heavy dose of regional travel highlights. I was in Gettysburg for their winter festival weekend, sneaking in one more visit before they all return back to the outskirts of Amsterdam at the end of the month.

In many ways, the commonality between Beaver Falls and Gettysburg ends with their size (8,000 or so humans) and shared state (Pennsylvania). Gettysburg has an esteemed university and an historical context that draws academics and tourists from around the world. (Seriously, if you are anywhere nearby, go. You will be in awe.) Beaver Falls is more blue-collar and industrial, in a perennial state of transition as factories change hands.

But last week, there were just enough similarities between the towns to make me feel like I was walking through yesteryear.

The patina of age on the brick-and-siding clad houses with their wrought iron handrails. The window A/C units, covered for winter. So many churches. The inside of Hannah’s rental with its dark wood cabinets, combo laundry/powder room, the layers of paint. How people greeted us from their front porches as we strolled by, or stopped their cars and waved us through so we could blatantly jaywalk. Similar accents to the ‘yinz’ of my youth. The tight community that was evident in the gossip I overheard at the Gettysburg Bakery. The foothills in the distance, making a layer-cake effect where the gray sky met the blue ridge. The open meadows, interrupted by the occasional weathered red barn.

Standing there in Gettysburg while experiencing Beaver Falls, I realized how far I’ve come from the small-town life of my youth. I am decidedly metropolitan these days, typing this from a Virginia modern day treehouse while in between trips to Lisbon and London.

So how did I go from the girl in the canning cupboard to the Middle East traveling, Financial Times reading globalist I have become?

I think about my small town origins with fondness, but I know not everyone feels the same about the settings of their youth. Sometimes culture, lifestyle, acceptance, self-preservation is what drives us from our hometowns, whether they be big or small. And even when our childhood communities fit originally, there may come a point when they don’t any longer.

For me, I left not because I wanted to but because I had to. There were exactly zero jobs in Beaver Falls when I graduated from my tiny western PA college in 1990. And none in the next biggest city, Pittsburgh, either. So it wasn’t much of a decision. I took the best opportunity that presented itself: a systems engineer role in Virginia.

But I also didn’t return when I could’ve — when the economy improved half a decade later. By that point I’d gotten a taste of the world, and couldn’t imagine going back to what I knew when there was so much to see beyond the horizon. My study abroad gave me a Lebanese boyfriend born and raised in Kuwait, a pack of English friends who helped me see that my perspective was only one of many, and a realization that the previously imaginary land of Europe was both real and available to me thanks to my eurorail pass and 60 liter backpack.

The genie wasn’t going back in the bottle after that.

But in the classic 20-something way, none of that was really conscious. It just was one step at a time up a ladder of decisions, while I never swiveled my head to look back down. I only looked onward, always onward.

Looking back (finally), it essentially feels like happenstance. Technically I was making the decisions, but not with a grand plan, and often it didn’t feel like much of a choice at all.

Rather, my external circumstances laid out options, while my internal interests, goals, ambition, and often scarcity mentality gave me tunnel vision for which of those seemed viable. Truth be told, most of the time I could really only see one path forward: Go to college at a close-by school that wouldn’t bury me under student loans. Study abroad in London because it was international, but not too far from home. Take whatever job offered me the most money out of college. Go to business school because that would make me more money. Climb the corporate ladder. Move to a neighborhood close to a major airport for Mike’s job and with good schools for the kids, etc.

Eventually, it added up to a life.

So basically, I am who I am today because there weren’t any jobs for me in Western PA.

We like to think that we make choices, but often choices make us.

This realization is a little unsettling, but as I sit with that sentence without deleting it, it starts to feel freeing. I don’t have to know exactly where I’m going or what I’ll be doing with the next 5 or 10 or 20 years. So much could happen between now and then that will make that decision for me. I just have to make the best of whatever squiggly path life sets me out on.

Hmm, that’s a good idea for a New Year’s Eve post… But we’re not quite there yet. We’re still at the part where we’re traveling to hometowns or to families or old friends. We’re having the weird double-vision of being both the person we’ve become and the person we were. Standing in a kitchen that’s smaller than we remember or driving past our old high school, and feeling that temporal distance which also feels like a mirage. Like any moment you’ll wake up from a dream and realize you’re still in junior year, stressing about the swim meet next week.

We go so far, do so much, but on some level, still remain ourselves.

It feels like one of those mysteries of consciousness that some big-brained philosopher has spent a lot of time untangling, but this holiday season I’m just going to sit in it, enjoying yet another slightly psychedelic part of being alive.

To being ambushed by memories,

Sue

(Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.)

Get full access to The Luminist at theluminist.substack.com/subscribe