I have what can probably best be described as a completely primal sense of place.  I don’t think I can tell you what that actually means, but every summer,  my family spends a week in Lackawanna, NY, where my mom still lives in the same house I grew up in.

As my mother ages, I don’t suppose I need to explain why I take my family to visit every year.  Our stated reason has always been to go to the Erie County Fair, which just happens to be largest county fair in the country.  (I swear.  You could look it up.  The Erie County Fair has it’s own website.  And if I’m wrong about that, at least I’m pretty sure that it was at some point the largest county fair in the country.)

We  try to get to the Fair  in the morning, close to 10am when it opens, although obviously this gets harder as one’s children become teenagers and no longer experience morning unless forced to by state law or their mother.  Or sometimes ski season.  My husband always makes me swear we’ll leave before it closes at 11pm.  Sometimes we even do, but more often we do not.  Say what you will about Paris or New York, but to me, there’s nothing like seeing the lights go out on the James E. Strates Midway from the parking lot at the Fair.

I make my family look at the rabbits and the horses — they balk at checking out the cow and pig barns, but we do watch the Swifty Swine pig races.   There were a couple of years where we saw the lightweight horse pull, which is pretty cool; once we saw the heavyweight horse pull, which is actually mind-bending.  The kids and I go on the rides, although my husband does not.  They play carnival games, I Got It and the one where you squirt water into something’s mouth and sometimes The Wand.  I don’t like the games, but some years they win big. (And I have never been able to toss those stupid stuffed animals they won at the Fair, which is probably some kind of karmic payback for making them walk 200+ dusty acres in the August heat.)

We check out the RVs and hot tubs, and one year we drove a Toyota Tundra over an obstacle course.  Last year, I had vertigo and I did the Fair in one of those electric scooters that really old people ride.  (Tt was not a good experience.  Those things are much harder to drive that you think.)  This year, I had a “Free Fall Experience,” which involved climbing up 30 feet to a platform and jumping off into an absolutely gi-normous airbag.  My children have a video on their phones.  It was pretty fun.  (Obviously, the vertigo is completely gone.) Before we leave, we usually buy something from what my family calls the “Infomercial Building” and the Fair map calls the “Commercial Building” — rubber band guns, rigid plastic cones to scrape ice off your windshield, special iPhone cleaner (although, to its credit, it also works on jewelry and glasses).

The part of the Fair we all really look forward to, of course, is Fair food — roasted corn dunked into a bucket of melted butter, cheesesteaks, Italian sausage with onions and peppers, frozen cheesecake on a stick, ribbon fries, Chiavetta’s barbequed chicken dinners.  My daughter drinks gallons of Fair lemonade; we buy Fowler’s salt water taffy for my mom, who can’t come with us anymore (even in one of those scooters, and I am genuinely sorry I was so mean to her about her scooter driving skills) , and candied nuts for us to eat in the car on our way back to New Jersey.  We leave completely exhausted, usually with a bit of sunburn and a bit of nausea.  The good kind.  Not the vertigo kind.

When the children were younger, we spent a day at Fantasy Island too — more rides plus a water park.  (It’s a testament to how much my husband loves me that he participated, almost always with extremely good humor, in these excursions.)  I’ve started insisting on visiting  historical sites:  Fort Niagara, Our Lady of Victory Basilica, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff on Lake Erie.  We hang out with my high school friends, and it makes me feel complete in some weird way to say that my kids are friends with my high school friends’ kids.   We go to Fran-Ceil’s for frozen custard, real, full-fat custard in fantastic flavors like butterscotch and raspberry and pistachio.  We’ve gone to Niagara Falls, to the Anchor Bar to have chicken wings, and to Stratford, Ontario for the Shakespeare Festival.

My children used to play in the playground near my mother’s house, which was full of tall, dangerous and fun things made of steel that were too hot to sit on comfortably on an August afternoon — steep slides with no sides, towers 10 feet off the ground with old metal ladders, swings shaped like horses.  They replaced all the equipment there last year, with lower, safer, plastic coated things and rubber mulch to cushion a fall. It’s bright blue, and, to my daughter, tragic.

Lackawanna, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is a steel-town suburb south of Buffalo.  It is not beautiful, and frankly, it never was. We don’t go for the beauty, although it’s there if you can see it.  We go because I still have friends there.  We go because my mom is 86 years old.  But mostly we go because, even now, it’s my home.

Even now.  Even now that I have a bright and beautiful home of my own in an upscale New Jersey suburb. Even now that my life’s foundation rests firmly in the heart and soul of a good, good man who knows me well and loves me anyway.  Even now — or maybe especially now, almost 40 years after I stalked away from my parent’s house, from the red striped awnings, that big front window in the kitchen, and my father’s rock gardens, with a fierce and frantic desire to go somewhere – anywhere – else, anywhere else but this narrow little town with a close grey sky, a smoking corpse of a once-mighty steel plant, and no place for somebody like me who always felt so different from all the people who seemed so damned comfortable there.

Especially now.  Now that I know the world’s a much bigger place but often not that much less narrow. Now that I know that even the widest skies can be grey.  Now that I know that people are not always what they seem to be, and that comfort is given and taken but is not a destination.

Because life, after all, takes place  — at your mother’s kitchen table, on the Ferris Wheel at the Fair, in the church on the corner of Ridge Road and Center that was demolished years ago.  Lackawanna is my place. Like the pencil lines we make on the door jamb to mark our children’s growth, I go home every summer to mark mine.