There is only one fast food restaurant where I grew up - the Arby's down Route 6, past the IGA and the Wayne Bank on the way to Hawley. Hawley itself - the 'downtown' portion - is a mere three blocks long, encompassing a post office, a library, a diner and a Chinese place and a pizza place and a deli, a park and a gas station. After and before that, there are trees, winding two lane roads, the sloping hills of the Pocono Mountains, and Lake Wallenpaupack.

With a fifty-mile shoreline, it's the largest man-made body of water in Pennsylvania, and being only two hours from New York City and three from Philly, it's a tourist trap. Crowded in summer with overbearing urban visitors, much richer with their boats and summer homes than the actual year-round residents, during the winter life around the lake is quiet. Slow. Gray and steady. The families who have been here for generations - my parents and grandparents included - go to plays and concerts at the high school, sit at home and watch sitcoms, go to church on Sundays.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life here. I got out as soon as possible.

I headed to an artsy college in the center of Boston: bright lights, big city, the opposite of everything I had known. I explained my hometown to the new people I met in over-simplified, short sentences: It's like, 99% Republican. You had to drive forty five minutes to get to a movie theater. Our school mascot was the Buckhorn. It took awhile, but I grew into Boston: using the subway instead of cars, listening to sirens and drunk people on the street while falling asleep instead of crickets and the wind. The more I became a city person, the more the place I grew up became a mere caricature of all conservative small towns in the way I described it: simply small, suffocating and boring, rather than the place that actually reared me for most of my life, that had unique names and places and memories. But in the months approaching my graduation from college, Lake Wallenpaupack just kept popping up more and more in my head - old private jokes, random pieces of conversations and scenes.

Maybe since I'm immersed over my head in bank accounts and resumes and rent checks and The Future, I am overly sentimental about the time - and the place I was then - when I didn't have to worry about any of those things. Or maybe the truth is, four years later, I've finally gotten over my high school angst. I kind of like my town.

It is strange - coming to terms with where I grew up at the same time that I know that I will probably never come back to it for good. Life is big. I need horizons that are wider. How do I approach a place that is so much home, while knowing it never really can be again?

One thing I know for sure is this: Places like Lake Wallenpaupack - where everyone knows everyone else and strangers are friendly, where memory runs deep - are few, and they keep on diminishing. My favorite fields are turning into developments with identical houses so large few from the actual town could afford them. Dirt roads are being paved over; Dave's Pharmacy in Hawley was bought out by CVS; BMWs and Volvos are replacing beat up Fords and used Chryslers in the high school parking lot. Too many boats and too much watershed development is depriving the lake of oxygen, aging it too fast.

But photographs can stop time and preserve it, or at least present you with the illusion of doing so, and so I went home, and I took these for me. This is my documentation of where I grew up as it is now and as I remember it, in pine trees and family restaurants and rusting mailboxes and a rocky shoreline: lonely and comforting, a tribute to my own nostalgia.

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