I had just finished adjusting my fascinator to the properly impractical angle and was taking in the scene of the festooned and foolish with satisfaction, eager to join in. The 145th Kentucky Derby had all the makings of the fine affair Hunter S. Thompson so memorably described in 1970 as “decadent and depraved.”

Suddenly, through the blue veil of my cockeyed millinery, an energetic street salesman came into view. I actually heard him before I saw him. He was hocking T-shirts that said, “Donald F*cking Trump,” and “I’m the F*cking President.”

This winter, I went back to the woods. The backwoods.

My homeland is Central Pennsylvania, and I returned there to celebrate Christmas with the family and to help out with the coal furnace during the bleakest time of year (more on that later).

I just read a headline on the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I get what I deserve): '[Singer] Demi Lovato says they are no longer sure they want children — admitting life in their 30s without kids is "pretty nice" — as they open up about coming out as nonbinary and pansexual.’

Pennsylvania’s liquor laws are... vintage. But not in a single-malt Scotch kind of way that means they improve with age.

The state legislature did move the needle to the right side of draconian in 2016, but the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1983 assessment of “Pennsylvania’s backwardness” being “a hangover from the administration of Republican governor Gifford Pinchot, who was elected on a ‘dry’ platform in 1930,” remains accurate.

Summer is fading fast, and though, according to my calendar, “the Autumnal Equinox” (is that the newest model of Hyundai?) isn’t until September 22, all the things we love about the season — swimming, county fairs, outdoor drinking, the August congressional recess — are essentially over after this weekend. And while people mark Labor Day in different ways, one of the best is with a barbecue, one of the few culinary traditions America can truly call its own.

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over.

This Memorial Day I found myself at a grassy spot along La Prele Creek, resting my horse and having lunch out of the back of a Ford Explorer, with an eclectic group of new friends who had also volunteered to help the Cross family on their annual spring cattle drive.

Never did I think the day would come when I would be writing about West Virginia coal miners and Lululemon’s “Hotty Hot pants” in the same article. What truly strange times we live in.

There’s an automotive parts manufacturer in my hometown. The company has grown over the course of its 19-year life, from around 20 employees two decades ago to 45 full-time employees today. Despite the dirty nature of much of the work, the facility is kept clean, open, airy, and bright. There are no shavings on the floor or fumes in the air. The men who weld, bend, blast, and powder coat the metal parts and send them to the warehouse for packaging and shipment do so energetically.

When the mugginess of a northeastern summer begins to oppress your spirits, there’s only one thing to do: convince yourself the grass is greener — or safer, at least — on your side by heading to a place where people have it even worse.

Travelers road-tripping across Pennsylvania this summer, take heed: a war is brewing in the center of the state.

Buildings have been flattened. Families have been torn apart. The threat of an emerging third power regularly captures headlines and fuels the local rumor mills.

I hunted Pennsylvania whitetail deer this winter wearing the same thing my great-grandfather wore hunting one hundred years ago: a red and black plaid Woolrich hunting jacket.