Why write about the Finger Lakes?
The Finger Lakes region of New York State is a place where all these questions are present. In the personal sense, I lived in the Finger Lakes until I was in my mid-teens, and my parents still live in the house I grew up in there. It was a place marked by tragedy for my family, so I can say that I never thought of it as a benign landscape. But I always had this vivid remembered sense of childhood days around the lake and of being immersed in nature. My mother made sure that we knew, and shared her reverence for, the woods, the night sky. My parents both came out of the pre-World War II era, and their values were not the values of modern American consumerism. My mother’s family was hit very hard by the Depression, and we really got it at an early age that you can lose everything and that what is of value are things you can’t buy. You memorize poetry, and it’s always with you; it can’t be taken away. In the same way, a familiarity with nature will open to you a world of treasure and insi
