Colony Days celebrations Resslin Around by Casey Ressler

Next week, Colony Days take over downtown Palmer. I've always been impressed with how Colony Days can bring together a growing community and make it feel like an old-fashioned, small town again.

Events like Colony Days are important in the fabric of our growing communities. As we grow, oftentimes the past is simply discarded as something "that happened before I got here."

Colony Days, and similar small-town celebrations, bring that past back up to the front, to celebrate and cherish.

Keeping that small-town feel is important, because it helps foster a sense of community. That kind of feeling is what can keep the Valley from turning into Anchorage - the big-city feel with no sense of "neighborhood." The best part of Anchorage is the fact that it's only 10 minutes from Alaska, while the Valley is in the heart of Alaska.

As we grow and grow, that's the direction we're headed, particularly without a lot of planning taking place in conjunction with that growth.

This year is an especially interesting Colony Days celebration, as it marks the 70th anniversary of the Matanuska Colonist project.

I could spend afternoons talking with some of the people who came here as young children, their families transplanted from the Midwest to this tiny little area in Alaska to farm and homestead.

They tell tales of a Valley not many of us could envision, and we all could stand to learn something from them.

There will be a parade, an outdoor market and the normal Colony Days stuff going on throughout the weekend.

But for the people who came here as kids, the real reason we have Colony Days won't be forgotten. Just ask them about the "good old days," and I'm sure they'll tell you about their parents' dairy farm, the Colony barn on their old property or any other interesting stories from seven decades ago.

Casey Ressler (valleylife@frontiersman.com) is the Valley Life editor. He has never even visited a dairy farm.