Dateline: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In the summer of 1969, my mother, my father, and I traveled across country from our home in Woodland, California all the way to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

The trip was not unlike the one my mother and I made this past spring, but instead of heading west, we headed east and after a brief visit with relatives in Edwardsville, Illinois, we continued on our trek.

The community in which we found ourselves, was a small college town with a train station right in the center of it, and while I can’t speak to what the community of Swarthmore is like today, at the time, it was very parochial, and not particularly welcoming of newcomers.

We had arrived one day past the cut off for summer school, so I spent a rather solitary summer reading two books a day (the maximum allowed for credit at the reading program at the local library), walking to the post office to send missives back to my closest friend, Sue, and making my way to a five-and-dime store that was not as well stocked as the Woolworths “back home,” but which was more that enough for my eight-year-old soon-to-be nine-year-old self.

One thing Swarthmore did do with more enthusiasm than my hometown of Woodland, California, was celebrate the Fourth of July. There was a parade and a fire truck and all of it was accessible in ways that were unfamiliar to me. The entire celebration was, to my eight-year-old way of looking at things, quite grand, and it was, and has continued to be, one of the most memorable Fourth of July celebrations of my life.

So this morning I got up early and after catching a connecting flight in Chicago, I arrived in Pittsburgh just in time to get this photo:

As for my crochet, I packed what I think of as crafting “travel kit” which included these sixteen future five-inch rehabbed crochet squares with their many ends woven in and trimmed:

Which I tied end-to-end and added to my scrap yarn ball collection:

So that when time and circumstances permit, I can once again resume work on this scrap yarn ripple afghan which I started work on last year at just about this time:

I don’t know what tomorrow’s celebration in Pittsburgh will be like, but if, as I suspect, I get to see the fireworks over the river, and their reflection in it, it should be almost as spectacular as the other Pennsylvania Fourth of July so many years ago.