Turning off the Weepy Faucet

I spent the first part of last week in New York, packing boxes and weeping.  I was a leaky faucet of nostalgia.  It wasn't the stuff that brought out the sense of loss -- we can bring all the crap we want with us -- the spaces carved out the memories, people and events that appeared and disappeared like holograms. Our apartment is a set of jewel boxes, each small room shoving ghosts from its walls every time I walked into one.  Our kids sprawled out on beds, playing music, video games, eating, talking, joking around, melting back into their own lives. Toddler grandchildren skating back and forth along the floorboards, becoming longer and slower between increasingly infrequent visits.  Scenes from our marriage riding the sine waves of happiness and conflict in the tiny dark bedroom.  The corners of our home businesses lit up by screens that urged out thought and, amazingly, some money.  The open kitchen where food was delivered into the living area on large platters to serve decades of family and friends, some dead now, some missing, and some remaining, coming to celebrate under the high ceiling our small and large events throughout this quarter of a century.

Then, there are the spaces around the building where spirits rise up from the sidewalks and the streets. The routine morning route from our apartment to the subway, our local restaurants where everyone knew at least our first names, the movie theater around the corner, the glorious Union Square Green Market -- the only mark of weather -- painting the seasons from drab to dazzling.  And, on our corner, the Twins eternally rising and collapsing in some terrible loop where Fifth  reaches to the south; then, on turning, the comforting and solid Empire State Building stretching and yawning to the north.  The small family stories and restaurants opening and closing to the rising rents until only the gaping mouths of the mall stores support the neighborhood, no longer friendly.  “Do you live here?” The New Balance sales person asked when I bought my new trainers last week at their store across Fifth.   I couldn’t speak. 

On Thursday, we headed back to Hudson and had dinner at DaBa's, our local hangout here for great food and bar talk.  Feeling miserable and uncertain about our choices, I chomped on my comforting fish taco and started a conversation with the woman next to me, a heavy set person, who gave her age away when she said she had graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe.  She has a Chinese herbal business in a nearby town, but seemed a bit befuddled, maybe from the martini, and I couldn't quite figure out what the business was.  It didn't sound like she grew or even sold the herbs.  I gathered she was a consultant. Another ex-pat, she moved up to the area about 10 years ago. After we talked a bit about the value, or lack of it, of Chinese Medicine, the conversation began to drift to the local organic/ecologic movements in Columbia county.   "It's the center of everything going on now in the country," she said.  "It's like an underground network for the ecology movement." Anthroposophy and biodynamic farming, alternative energy business, permaculture, the invasive-native species war, locavore restaurants and farmer's markets, herbal remedies and alternative treatment centers, the Cornell extension center, seed libraries, happy cows and pigs grazing across wide green swaths.  "You just have to find the people involved." 

On Friday, the contractor and excavator came to mark out the potential site for building a house -- as green as possible -- on our land, which is chock full of invasive species needing mass extermination, native plants that are homes for critters and pollinators and require a shepherd, potential plots for more local plants and for healthy vegetables -- maybe enough to feed people outside my kitchen.  All of these spaces without ghosts waiting for the final efforts of my life. "Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandelnsich" (Rudolph Steiner).  The art is eternal; only the shapes shift. I turned off the faucet.