Not too many years ago, if you approached Bethlehem from the north (I can't vouch for any other direction), you passed through farmland almost up to the city's border. Cows. Silver-gray-weathered barns. The battered elegance of old farmhouses. Orchards. Genuine amber waves of grain.
Those of you who aren't really into all this rurality (although farms are still where most of our food comes from), bear with me. In this case I am talking mostly about food for the soul.
The entire Lehigh Valley used to have this same quality of patches of urbanity sprung up amid the alien corn. Coming into Allentown from the north, you could see the city from miles away, with the familiar PP&L building standing up in its midst like an exclamation point.
It was beautiful to look at. It was soul-satisfying. It gave you the feeling there was something to escape to. If you were, for example, frazzled by long work hours at Bethlehem Steel, maybe you could use some of your "off" time to go for a ride in the country and buy fresh produce at a farm stand. If you couldn't stand the farm another minute, you could go and have lunch and shop at Allentown's world-famous department store, Hess's.
The farmland around Bethlehem and Allentown was not a vacuum, moreover, but itself an expression of a very old, Germanic cultural tradition--one that, for simplicity's sake, we may call Pennsylvania Dutch. (I understand that, to be politically correct, one must now say "Pennsylvania German;" but I grew up thinking I was Pennsylvania Dutch, though I knew perfectly well that Pennsylvania Dutch, the dialect was Germanic. I, and no doubt many others, intend to go on thinking of ourselves as Pennsylvania Dutch.)
These days, though, most of the Pennsylvania Dutch/Germans have lost their farms, and the culture has found, perhaps, a last bastion at Kutztown University. There, there is an institute about us. I'm glad of that, although it is no substitute for being a culture to be reckoned with--which we were within my lifetime.
All this by way of prelude to mention of a news story I just read in the Morning Call. It seems that the development proposal made by Bethlehem developer Nic Zawarski & Sons for a tract of some of the most rural land left in Bethlehem Township was turned down by the commissioners of that township.
According to Morning Call reporter Daryl Nerl, the land the Zawarski firm wishes to turn into a profit farm contains cornfields, a farmhouse, a barn, a deer pen, and a trout hatchery, among other rural amenities. Water from the pools of the trout hatchery flows into the Monocacy Creek, Bethlehem's famed in-town trout stream (and infamous flooder of historic properties.)
I don't know whether this was originally a Pennsylvania Dutch farm, or somebody else's. I do know that the developer plans to submit a revised development scheme, and that, thanks to the concept of "development," this place is doomed. No use in blaming the Zawarski firm in particular; it is just doing what developers do. If not Zawarski, it would be another company pushing the process.
As I said, wave goodbye to heritage, goodbye to rural beauty, goodbye to one of the things that made the old Lehigh Valley so special.

(For more of Berengaria, read In Search Of Healing, http://insearchofhealing.blogstream.com )