20 Things Every Kid Growing Up in the Southern Tier Did at Least Once

There's a smell that takes you right back. Something humid and green and faintly mossy, like the rivers are always just around the corner, because they are. If you grew up in and around Binghamton, New York, you know exactly what that air feels like against your skin, heavy and soft in the summer, sharp and clean after a snow. Your body remembers it even when your mind doesn't.

The Southern Tier doesn't get nearly enough credit. It's not the Adirondacks. It's not New York City. It's something better, actually, if you grew up here. It's the kind of place that leaves fingerprints on you forever, in the best possible way.

People who didn't grow up here don't always get it. They see the gray winter skies and the old downtown buildings and the hills that seem to fold in around everything, and they move on. But you know what's underneath all of that. You know what it felt like to be a kid here, with the rivers running through the middle of everything and the carousels waiting in the parks and the whole slow magic of a Southern Tier summer stretching out in front of you like it would never end.

This place shaped you. The snow days and the state parks, the zoo on the hill, and the smoke rolling across Otsiningo Park. The radio voices reading school closings in alphabetical order while you stood in your pajamas and prayed. The fog sitting low in the valley on October mornings. All of it.

Get our free mobile app

Here are 20 things every kid who grew up in the Southern Tier did at least once. See how many take you straight back.