Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Adagio at Five O'Clock

Driving out of town around 5:30, having bought wine and hideously expensive but wonderful cheese (goat bris and a harder cow cheese from France), my IPhone, plugged into the speaker, started playing Barber's Adagio (more popularly known as the Elephant Man theme music).  The piece is so loaded with beautiful sorrow that I decided to keep driving until it stopped.  I went down Middle Road past our barn, going about 40, and then drove through nearby farm land, low green hills and wide fields of dry corn stalks belted by the road curving through them.  The sun diving into the west suddenly splashed the deep shadows of this autumn landscape into  glorious swatches of color until the air itself was gold and red.  The music drifted with the car, matching the shifts in the scenery as if God was playing to its changes.  I reached the end of the country road at the exact moment the music stopped.  It was fucking unbelievable.  That night I roasted local chicken and braised yellow beans from the garden and undercooked potatoes for friends who just bought a house nearby after living in Venice, Italy for 15 years.  We got drunk and talked until midnight.  I don't miss New York.  I never thought I'd say that.

Soup Tasting at Greenport Fire Station

My neighbor Gale suggested we go to the soup tasting held at the Greenport Fire Station, a flat unpretentious building sitting along one of the route 23s that run through and around Hudson.  (For some reason, Columbia County swarms with route 23s and 9s, followed by various letters to differentiate them.  The past and present county fathers and mothers appear to lack the imagination to make numerical leaps to a 10 or 24.)  


The soup tasting is an annual event, intended to raise money for the fire station.  One could choose three bowls for 6 dollars if you wanted to take them away, or you could buy one bowl if you were eating there and keep going back indefinitely. Gail and I were doing take out, so we were given three small plastic bowls and a paper bag. About 20 steamers and slow cookers were lined up along one wall, womanned by several wives of the local firemen, some from our very own Becraft Pumper, the fire house that protects the end of Middle Road, where Michael and I rent out apartment. 

The opposite side of the room was filled with men chowing down -- many of whom were husbands of the soup makers. In the center table Gary Mazzacano, a Middle Road neighbor and also the Fire Chief and recently defeated Republican primary candidate for sheriff, was surrounded by his fire acolytes. He joked around with Gail, whose husband Shawn is a volunteer at the Becraft Pumper, the fire station at the end of our Middle Road that hosts monthly breakfasts of pancakes, any egg type you want (including the chef's irresistible scramblers), corned beef hash, and bagels and toast.   I met Sean for the first time one Thanksgiving when he, in full fire regalia, came pounding through the front door of our apartment into the kitchen, where I stood humiliated in front of my smoking oven.  He turned and called back to his fellow firefighters, "Burned turkey!"  And left.  

At the Greenport Station soup tasting event, the clam chowder is particularly highly regarded, cooked up by an elderly lady who Gail hoped was still alive this year, and who was and actually promised Gail the recipe.  Other excellent soups included creamed turkey, corn chowder, cabbage, sausage and black bean, a very thick chicken noodle, split pea, a crab bisque and Sunday soup (a hearty tomato beef stock loaded with meatballs).  There was also a Mac and cheese soup, a yellow lava-flow that was a little intimidating.  

As I walked the line, I made expansive sounds and exclamations about the soups and how I had a terrible time choosing my three because they all looked so fabulous.  The women behind the soup vats offered polite smiles in response.  I checked out the crab bisque but rejected it because, as I said loudly (everything I said there was loud), it would kill my husband.  

Out front a table was set up with paints and what looked like coloring books. Dawn, however, was missing. Two super obese men, sitting in front of a fire truck guarding a gaggle of pumpkins that were for sale, nodded at me.  I didn't go back into the firehouse to see if I could locate Down and the secret of her stock.  I sat in the car with my soup and waited for Gail, who was successfully cadging recipes inside. 

A friend of ours who ex-patted from Brooklyn to a farm 2200 feet up in Bovina, NY and is trying to grow root vegetables and pigs is called by the locals a "citiot".  I think this might have resonated with the soup ladies.

"Is it worth it?" I asked heartily.  


Gary also lives on Middle Road, so all of his neighbors, including we Democrats, put up signs for him, which apparently weren't sufficient to beat the opposing Republican in the county wide primary, who the paper said "trounced Mazzacano" and who apparently didn't need signs, because I never even knew his name.  We hope Gary runs again, although I'm still a registered Dem in Manhattan so I can't vote for him anyway.

"Sure," she said, and she did smile but not with any sense of irony, which was a little worrisome. 
I went for the clam chowder, pea soup, and the turkey -- the latter because, as I announced to the room,  I can't figure out how to make decent turkey soup.   I wondered, again loudly, if the woman who made the turkey soup actually used stock, since I explained turkey stock is usually so awful.  I made other stock words, and the woman overseeing the turkey soup looked at me blankly and said that Dawn, the turkey cook soup, was outside doing face painting and suggested I go out and ask her.  
 "Good idea. Thanks so much," I said with a creepy effusiveness. 




Walking the Easement: First Steps Toward a House

Two young men showed up this morning to monitor our easement -- the 70-ish acres of land whose development rights we donated to Scenic Hudson.  Mike, the main contact, is a tall thin guy, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and good boots.  With him is Dan, a volunteer who's apprenticing.  He's shorter, more heavy set, holding a yellow GPS instrument.  Both are, as one would expect, entirely pleasant and engaged in their work.
  
We walk up the path that Michael has mowed, going westward up the long hill.  The goldenrod ruled this year, now all stalky and dry, but still lending a mellow yellow to the general space.  A few milkweed are scattered through them, their satisfying pods split open and silken with seeds ready to take off.  Passing over the hill, there is a sudden expansion of a lower field and a satisfying invasion of St. John's Wort, a plant that has some proven ability to reduce depression -- but perhaps because it's entire growing cycle provides pleasure -- from it's puffy yellow flowering in the summer to the phalanx of small, hard brown seeds that march up its stems in the fall.  


The path forks into two directions: west and north.  We turn right along the back edge of the field until we reach our neighbor's road, which borders the north side of our property.  We follow it west beside a grove of pine trees and stop at the line between Olana and our property.  

From there we retrace our route back up the road and across the field to the original fork in the path; there we turn right and head south to end of the path, where we break through the brush, grass, and bushes to check our little pond, which was originally dug to catch run-off from the apple orchards. When we first bought the land, Michael could mow all around it, but the pipe that drained off the water from the surrounding hills had collapsed and the area has become too swampy.  For a couple of years, I had cleared out some of the brush around the pond and planted iris and day lilies, but it was too tough to maintain. Now the pond is basically inaccessible but still a great landing spot for heron and a breeding ground for frogs. 
As we push back through the grass, I ask Mike and Dan if they get bitten by deer ticks.  Mike says he's just recovering from Lyme disease and Dan had it earlier.  We all stop and check ourselves and Mike shakes off two ticks.
Back on the path, we head up to the highest spot, my favorite place, which opens to the Catskills on the West and the Berkshires to the East.  I can sit up there and meditate, do yoga, or just veg out.  In the summer, the neighboring house is blocked by trees and I figure I could go naked if I wanted.  
We head back and across the upper field toward the site on the south side of the property, where we will be allowed to build, if that's what we decide to do. There's too much brush (and probably too many ticks) to fight our way through to get any sense of the site itself, so we head back to the barn, where I'm able to unload my last two pumpkins on the boys before they head off.  They approve of our ideas for a house and say they enjoyed walking our land.  This is the first step.  



  






Is There Life After New York

I grew up outside of Averill Park,  New York, a town about ten miles east of Albany, in an 1860s farmhouse that was about a quarter mile from the next neighbors and across the road from farm land that grew corn during the summer, served as our ski slope in the winter, and led up to a hill where I could express adolescent despair during the other months.  I lived there from the time was 5 in 1948 to when I went to college in 1961.  The town was nearly 100% Republican and extremely conservative-- one might say they were Urteapartyites.  The few Democrats were very very quiet and very very old.

Max Bucholtz, the local butcher, was said to have belonged to a Nazi bund during WWII, with meetings held in the Berlin (yes really) mountains, which rose east of town toward the Vermont border. A schoolmate announced in our history class that all Jews were communists because her father worked for the post office and had access to the commie list, on which every single person was Jewish.  The Rosenbergs and Silbergs, the only Jewish families in town, were well liked, however, and apparently either forgiven or exempt from the Red taint.  My girlfriends and I had terrible crushes on Billy Rosenberg.  Our local handy man was known to be gay, and I heard my father and other grown men giggle in stupid ways when they talked about him. As far as I know, though, he was never threatened and everyone used him to fix things.  

Church and state were closely knit.  We held a nativity pageant in school every Christmas.  The Catholic kids needed to go to church school every Thursday afternoon, because there was no Catholic school in the area.  So in the interest of fairness, the Protestants  were bussed to the local Presbyterian church on the same afternoon, where we read the bible and acted out stories from the old Testament. Charlie Rosenberg, Billy's brother, was lumped in with us, since the school didn't know what else to do with him and probably figured that if we stuck to the Old Testament it would be ok.

Our junior year history teacher stated that no President should be an atheist, and when I wore my hair straight that year -- 1960 -- my friends called me a beatnik and wouldn't talk to me.  I was saved by three events:
  • My father's "conversion" to Unitarianism when I was thirteen, allowing escape from the dreary, claustrophobic Methodist Church in town and getting us into Albany, where we heard sermons on Emerson, Channing, and Thomas Jefferson, and, yes Virginia, there were liberals.
  • Going to New York by bus on my 16th birthday with my friend Clare, where we saw West Side Story, had a Tadd's steak for the remarkable price of $1.95 (cheap even by Averill Park standards), and was hit on by some guy there who said he worked for a newspaper. I was blown away by the crowds, the noise, the theater, everything I saw, smelled, and heard.  
  • The election of JFK in 1961 and it's celebration by our smart cute history teacher, Mr. Hogan, who lasted only a year at our highschool, but who transformed my political and social beliefs forever.
I went to Bennington College, and I spent summers and my work term in winters in Manhattan, living on nothing and living in tiny spaces.  I never went back to Averill Park.  Except for five years as an Air Force wife, I have lived in NYC for almost fifty years.  I never thought I'd leave and I never, ever thought I would end up back in upstate New York.

So this blog is about that. I raised three kids in New York City and retired this year after a very satisfying career publishing, writing, and editing medical information for patients and docs.  Michael, my husband and I, are now testing out Hudson, New York, where we bought land about 10 years ago and have been renting an apartment in a barn across the road from friends, who are also city weekenders.  We will be deciding whether we should build on our property or move back to our apartment on 20th street, currently being rented by our two sons.  We can't afford both places, so it's do or die here.