Taking the Long Way Home

When I was a small child, I used to visit my paternal grandparents and aunts and uncles in Elmer New Jersey - a small, rural town in the heart of South Jersey that you probably have never heard of. My whole extended family lived in houses next to each other and across the street from each other on Main Street: the quieter part of Main Street - the part that crosses Shirley Road by the bridge over Elmer Lake, after the shops and the fancier Victorians end and the street narrows.

My family lived in Northeast Philadelphia at the time, in a cul-de-sac where all the houses looked like the same, nondescript box. Trees were few and far between, and, really, the only green were the squares of grass, sparingly planted between the concrete sidewalks and paved driveways.

Elmer was the opposite. The woods, the lakes, the fields of vegetables, the pens of pigs and roaming chickens! The sound of crickets and frogs at night were a welcome respite: not only from my urban neighborhood, but also from the nightly fights and angry yelling of my unhappily married parents.  I loved our weekend trips to Elmer. Elmer was heaven.

My parents separated the summer before my first year in grade school. We moved to the other side of the city, to the suburbs. My dad would pick us up on his weekends to drive me and my three siblings to Elmer.  (Again, another welcome respite as my mom had left one angry loveless marriage, to another that was also filled with nightly, violent fights. This time, not due to a lack of love, but to my step-father’s addiction to alcohol.)

I remember those weekends, colored in a warm-summer haze.  Funny, I am sure that we visited my grandparents in the wintertime, but I only remember the summers. The heat of the hot South Jersey sun, the scratchy feel of August grass on my shoeless feet, hours spent outdoors, roaming the woods in back of my grandparent’s house, looking for snapping turtles, frogs and other wildlife, while avoiding the long, black snakes that call South Jersey home. I remember the double swing glider in my grandparent’s backyard, sitting across from my older sister, Lorie, at dusk, pumping our legs to make it go higher and higher, while belting out, “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?” into the oncoming night.

My dad eventually remarried and inherited 3 sons and another baby of his own. The weekend visits tapered off and then completely stopped and summers in Elmer became a memory, a thing of the past, a place I longed to go back to. It was Shangri La or Brigadoon to me - a mythical place. I would dream about waking up in Elmer, in my grandparent’s house, to the sound of a rooster’s crowing; I would fantasize about walking down the road, past the lake and up the stone path and through the front door and onto the screened in porch of my Aunt Nina’s house. Once I learned to drive, while listening to WXPN, I would hear the town of Elmer mentioned in radio ads for Appel Farm’s yearly music festival. Knowing Elmer - how small it was, how rural, how stuck in another time - I couldn’t believe that my Elmer New Jersey, was home to an internationally-renowned music festival. Elmer? Really?

Fast forward, 40 some years, and here I am back in Elmer, actually helping to plan and manage that very same festival at Appel Farm. How I arrived here is a story for another day.

The Appel Farm Music Festival has morphed into a two day festival (now called the South Jersey Arts Fest, June 2 and 3, 1 - 6pm) that unlike the original Music Festival, focuses on ALL of the arts - dance, music, theatre, visual arts - and specifically, all that South Jersey has to offer as a place to live and visit. It includes continuous performances on its main stage and a separate Kid’s Pop Up Arts Camp so parents can drop their kids off while they enjoy the festival kid-free. Three large interactive tents will have rotating workshops and smaller performances all day. Attendees can learn to Bollywood Dance in the Performing Arts Tent; they can discover how rainwater is collected and re-used to offset the effect of climate change and drought in the STEAM Tent; and they can lend their hand to painting a mural in the Visual Arts Tent. Food trucks, Flying Fish Beer, Auburn Road Vineyard wines, crafters and  a South Jersey Cycling Tour add to the experience. 

On Saturday night, attendees are invited to stay and listen to singer-songwriter Joe Crookston, as he performs at an evening bonfire. Then, they can fall asleep under Elmer’s giant night sky, and wake up on Sunday morning to the sound of a rooster crowing, just like I did when I was a child.

If you have never been to Appel Farm, the South Jersey Arts Fest is the perfect time to visit. Appel Farm’s 115 acre property is an artistic oasis in a small  town, population 1300. In addition to hosting the SJ Arts Fest, Appel Farm is also a residential arts summer camp where quirky, artistic kids (like I once was) can explore the arts in an environment where they can be their best selves without the usual childhood peer pressures. There, they can make friends for life and find their people. And in 2019, Appel Farm is set to become home to an Arts Charter School for students, grades 5 - 8.

All of my paternal aunts and uncles have passed away, save for one - my Aunt Nina. New people live in their houses which have all been remodeled with updated exteriors. Everything seems smaller than it did back when I was a kid - as it always does. Back then, my world was a block of Main Street in Elmer. I had no idea that Appel Farm was just a hop, skip and a jump (literally) down the road. And no where in my wildest imagination, did I ever think my dream would come true - that I would wake up again on a summer's morning in Elmer. 

But that is exactly how it is. I shake my head in disbelief that I am here, inviting others to visit my Brigadoon. It feels good to be home.

Join me at the SJ Art Fest!  More information: https://www.appelfarm.org/south-jersey-arts-fest/