Home for Christmas: Pennsylvania is the place of new beginnings for me
Iwas so excited to see Pennsylvania that I almost arrived at the top of Mount Summit, by the side of Route 40, as my mother made her way to the maternity unit at Uniontown Hospital in May 1976. At least that is what our family doctor likes to remind me.
As my husband drove me over Summit on a rainy Sunday in April 2000, I remembered that story while I counted contractions to the whip of the windshield wipers and prepared to give birth to my first child in the same hospital where I had taken my first breaths.
Pennsylvania is deep in my bones, embedded forever into my family’s story. My parents moved to Fayette County — living there as members of the Bruderhof community in Farmington — in 1968 with their two young children, and went on to have four more children there, ending with me. Route 40 went right by our Farmington home, and my parents, who integrated themselves immediately into the surrounding community, were first responders to numerous night-time highway crashes.
Whether it was snowstorms, new babies, illnesses, or a lack of furniture— my parents showed up and helped out. My mother, a seamstress, used her talents to encourage others, creating sewn items as birthday gifts or helping mend work clothes. My father, a farmer, partnered with the Bruderhof school to teach a generation of children to love and care for animals, and with them built a barn that stands to this day.
A few weeks after my arrival, our family moved to England, where, just one year later, my young mother died suddenly of a massive aneurysm. Her devastating loss echoed back to Fayette County, where the locals mourned her as one of their own.
It would be many years before I made it back to Pennsylvania. It had only been my home for the first seven weeks of my life, but I couldn’t wait to return.
The first time I came back was just after my engagement to Chris, when a colleague gave him tickets to a Three Rivers dinner cruise. I was already in love with Chris, but I added Pittsburgh to my list of loves that night.
Chris and I returned to live in Fayette County right after our honeymoon, and a couple years later welcomed our first child. It felt so right to be giving birth in the same place where I had arrived, as though completing a circle. We watched our infant son grow to a big, healthy two-yearold. Then, only a few months after we welcomed his brother into the world, we headed to Australia for what we expected to be a threemonth visit to friends. Three months has turned into 20 years.
But western Pennsylvania is still in my heart, still and forever a place I call home. Whenever I can, I return.
There is so much to love, from the rolling hills and wooded mountain slopes, to the magnificent Fallingwater and the serene Ohiopyle trails. But it’s the human connections I cherish most.
When our three sons (we added another in Australia!) were still in elementary school, we took them back for a white Christmas, not possible down under. We bundled the boys into a horse-drawn sleigh and traversed the snowy backwoods, stopping by houses where weather-worn mountain folk welcomed me in as “Hanna’s daughter” and showed me a table my father had built almost 45 years earlier, or a tablecloth my mother had sewn for a special occasion.
They didn’t know me, but they knew my family and that was good enough. We left with our mittens wrapped around Mason jars of cherries soaked in liquor whose origins we knew better than to ask after.
On Christmas Eve we attended a live nativity at the barn my father built. He had designed it intentionally with a gently arched roof where angels could stand, and an area for shepherds on one side, kings on the other — a place for people to gather on Holy Night and remember the most wonderful gift we were ever given: a new life who promises New Life.
Snow fell. The air bit. My young sons stood in awe at this place their grandparents had loved and built.
Last year, it was time to return home for Christmas again — to the places and people who know where I began, who take me in as family not (as Robert Frost suggested) just because they have to, but because the meaning of family is the thousand tiny memories and moments that secure us to who we are. After two years of pandemic separation, it seemed the perfect time to reconnect, to reignite the joyous traditions, to drink my uncle’s homemade blackberry wine and to sing carols.
Over the years, I have learned the secret of discovering home wherever I am. But Pennsylvania, where it all began, always pulls me back, irresistibly, to the familiarity of the mountains and the vitality of the city, back to the place where my mother was loved and known in what was to be the last years of her life, back to landscapes and friendships that remain unchanged throughout the seasons.