Hometowns are complicated places. 

This place where you learned to walk and talk and to ride a bike, where you had your first kiss and your first heartbreak, may be a place you never leave or the place you run farthest from. Now imagine trying to explain what it is that changes inside you when you’re in your hometown, that feeling that rises in your chest and settles in your core, that fuzziness that forms a bubble around you.

Each photograph I capture on Callicoon’s Tractor Parade is that feeling rendered in thousands of tiny bricks of color and light. 

Click. There’s the bright orange riding mower purchased up the road at my family’s small engine repair shop. 

Snap. There’s the neighbor whose grown up sons were once the little boys who made babysitting an epic adventure. 

Click. Click. Click. A high school classmate holding tight to the wheel of an old John Deere. The granddaughter of a lifelong friend grinning from a seat on a trailer. The girl I’ve watched grow from toddler to teen to 20-something. 

Each time I tap the button, I’m telling the story not just of the Tractor Parade but of all of us who have grown up in Callicoon, all the people who have been shaped by life in a river town in the Catskills, one that was built by German and Swiss immigrants, steeped in farming traditions.

Whether we’ve chosen to live here or far away, we are river kids and Catskills kids, kids from a farming town with one stoplight and one grocery store. 

Our hometowns are places, yes, but they’re also hundreds of thousands of memories strung together by this place that made us, for better and for worse. They’re the places where we are a particular version of ourselves, and all around us are the reminders that this is where we began.