The Alpha and Omega for Our Green Machine

To build a house, you start by digging.  Last November, we dug the first critical hole toward excavating our site: the perc (short for percolation) test.  The land had been cleared of its miserable thorny life and a brush pile the size and shape of a small hangar had been pushed back against the south side.   We then knew where we wanted our home to be, but we couldn't commit to its location without knowing at the outset where all our biologic outcomes were going to end up. We needed to locate the septic field, then we could work backward. The last shall be first.

Present at the perc ground breaking event were Michael and me, Pete our contractor, Neal the engineer, Evan the digger, and someone from the Health Department who was there to make sure our waste wouldn't be seeping into the Hudson water system. He gazed sleepily around, ambled behind everyone, and as far as I remember never spoke. 

The perc test is a surprisingly simple process for determining the location for such critical final results.  Neal first dug a small hole -- a foot or so deep -- around the area that would serve as our ideal septic field, a few hundred feet northeast of our fantasy house, up a slope and a safe distance flow-wise from where we wanted to garden and dig our pond.  Neal filled the hole with a bucket of water and then we all stared at the water as it percolated into the soil.  It's like watching a very, very slow race, where the water in the winning hole drops an inch within ten minutes.  Our hole beat this time.  Neal, who looks and sounds disconcertingly like Gary Shandling, flashed a toothy grin.  "Terrific." 

Evan hopped into a small digger and forked out the hole until it was about six feet deeper, first clawing up a thick layer of cakey top soil, then about four feet of silty loam, finally scraping across a base of gray clay. Everyone was excited.  Apparently this is a really, really good shit hole.  Pete looked down, "You don't ever see this in Columbia Country."

Neal nodded his head in agreement, and, as his only contribution to the event – but a welcome one -- so did the Health Department person.

Pete turned to us. "This could save you over $20,000.  If the clay were at a higher level, you'd have to build a berm."

"Huh." I said. "What's a berm?"  I have never owned a house. As an adult, I have always lived in apartments where God's representatives – superintendents and management agents -- took care of life's comforts. I envisioned a hideous above ground tank that stored our refuse, hoisted up through a pipe and pump contraption, where it festered until some low-paid local came around with a giant sucking hose and trucked it off to a toxic dump. Neal explained that a berm is a big mound of earth, high and porous enough to allow the sewage water from the septic tank to percolate.  At the time, I wondered why an earth hump would cost $20,000, but I have learned over the past few months after watching our house and land budget slowly bulge up to morbid obesity that $20,000 is a bargain.

Evan dug a few more holes in other places, but the original $20,000- saving hole remained the best spot. 

We then walked down toward the southeast base of our site where I hope to have a swimming pond. After only a foot, Evan's digger hit clay and water.  Pete smiled, "You won the lottery again.  Perfect for a pond."  Neal agreed, showing us his toothy grin and he pushed a couple of tiny flags into the earth to designate our septic field and pond.  We handed the health inspector a check for $500 as payment for his silent but essential presence in blessing our excretion field, and everyone left.  Except for a few visits from the surveyors, our recent nasty winter closed off the site and that was the end of earthmoving for the next few months. 

So we had the place where all things must end, and, with spring well in place, last week the Greenport highway department dug out the culvert for the driveway, where all things must begin. As with the berm, I didn't know what a culvert was -- or rather I had some misguided ideas from low-grade movies and books. "Children, stay away from the culvert!"  But the hapless toddler or reckless unappealing teener would crawl anyway into a nearby steel maw gaping out of the earth, where a rattlesnake would bite her or he would be washed away in a sudden flash flood. Culverts were also excellent locations for dumping murder victims. I didn't realize until last week that they had any purpose other than contrivances for bad plots. However, since attending Home Building University I have learned that if you don't have a culvert, your driveway will dissolve with the first big rain in the spring or will turn into a skating rink in the winter.

 The Greenport Highway Department is in charge of culverts, and as it happens, we know the Greenport Highway Supervisor, an appealing young man, who lives on our road.  He's also running for re-election this year on the Democratic slate, so we've been to the same local town and democratic committee meetings. With the first attempt, the worker placed the culvert too near the surface of the driveway and the gravel area was too narrow to support the monster trucks that will be bringing in the modules for our house. I assume our neighbor noticed that the trench was insufficient on his way home, because the workers came back the next day with even larger and louder equipment, which dug out a deeper trench and gave the culvert a thick layer, top and bottom, of excellent gravel.  The Supervisor's good attention to our culvert might be due to neighborliness or to my recent elevated positions as Treasurer of the Greenport Democratic Committee and as a member on the data-mining subcommittee of the voter registration committee of the Columbia County Democratic Committee.  Or he might just be an excellent Highway Supervisor.  It doesn't matter. He has my vote.  Local politics.  It's how they get you but that's another plotline in our Hudson story.

At this time, however, the plot to our house has most of our attention.  And now that the alpha and omega have been established, let the tracts and tunnels between them begin! But children, stay away from the culvert!

Celebrating My Birthday With Mr. Death

When I was about seven, an elderly neighbor, a Seventh Day Adventist who had been driven out of Nazi Germany, taught me the Lord's Prayer.  Even at that age, its King James cadence and exotic "shall" and "thou" and the image of god as a shepherd were thrilling and comforting.  Not so thrilling or comforting were her descriptions of the Nazi death camps, particularly a story about a female guard who made lamp shades out of Jewish skin. As a sop to the stories, she described Heaven as a noiseless, bland place made of gold, which inexplicably made her feel better in spite of that terrible knowledge.  It did nothing for me. About the same time, our school officials treated us with movies of the atom bomb going off in huge mushroom clouds. Hiding underneath our tiny maple desks during "duck and cover" exercises was about as reassuring as the gold plated Paradise. So by the time I was eight, I had discovered the inevitability of death and the void of non-being, and that the adults in the world were of no help at all.  (I believe that the intensity of the feminist movement rests on our early knowledge that guys were not going to protect us or our babies any more. In fact, they were out to get us.) Mr. Death became my annoying and more or less constant companion from then on.

So, I not only established a nightly Lord's Prayer, but to bolster its effects I tacked on two extra sections. The second part was a litany of fears: "Please don't make me die of polio, diphtheria, or diabetes.  Please make everyone live, our goats, our cats, our dog, Mom, Dad, my brother, my sisters", and, to play it safe "all my friends and relatives". (I left out our chickens.)  I later added a plea that god would make me forget about the "horrible man" and "horrible woman."  The former was the Phantom of the Opera, whose burn-scarred face appeared in a Classic Comic (ironically, the only comics we were allowed to read).  The horrible woman was the Nazi guard. Sometimes I was so sleepy that I caught myself repeating part 2, which, in my little OCD brain, I thought might negate the effects of my many critical prayer requests, so as a fail safe, I ended this section with "Please answer all my prayers whether I said them three times or not." 

The third part of my prayer was a conversation with god himself, a short chubby balding elderly man, who wore glasses. He vaguely resembled my grandfather. I have no idea why god showed up in my mind looking like this, but it must have been a powerful avatar, because he performed years later in a couple significant adult dreams.  Although a good Methodist child, I gave up Jesus when I was about eight, after my Catholic friend repeated a nun's story about a little girl with diabetes, who saw Jesus appearing before her while she was in bed and died the next day.  That night I apologized to Jesus and told him I had to pray directly to god from then on and to "please, please, don't visit me."

I produced this three-part prayer every night, even after my Dad turned from the Methodist to the Unitarian Church when I was thirteen and the family gods became Emerson and Jefferson.  Nevertheless, until I was eighteen, I repeated my DIY beadless rosary, hoping for some kind of spiritual experience, some god-pat-on-the-head that would muffle the ever-present thought that some day I would Cease to Be.  Nothing like that happened. In fact, during that time my cats, my dog, my goats all passed way.  My real grandfather died. I continued to think about the horrible woman, although the horrible man's effect lessened.  On the positive side, those nightly talks with Grandpa God did provide some comforting closure to the day.

When I left home for college, however, I finally gave up my talks with the Ur-Gramps. My freshman year, right before Christmas my childhood best friend died in a fire in her prep school dorm.  She was overweight and had played Santa Clause that night for her classmates.  The Christmas tree was under her room and caught fire. It was my first Other Death. I had no idea how to grieve or deal with her loss. I read Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Dostoyevsky, to make myself feel worse, and if I prayed at all, it was that I wouldn't die a virgin. I renounced Grandpa God, who hadn't been helpful at all, to have sex with boys my own age.  That prayer was answered, probably too enthusiastically. My Holy Grail became the Hunt for True Love, enabled by the sixties, when Love was not just cheap but Free. 

The following decade was noisy with war, babies, sex, protests, and my first marriage breaking on the shoals of Viet Nam.  It wasn't until I was 28, living in Bayonne, New Jersey, with two toddlers less than a year apart, that I started looking again for spiritual context.  Because this time my Death Fear now also included those small beings I had forced out into Life, and, so eventually, Not Life. I needed a spiritual fix to pass on to them, but Jesus and Grandpa had been out of the equation for years.  So, I looked West toward Esalen and Buddhism. I began my life-long erratic and haphazard meditation habit, sitting cross-legged and badgering my brain with Alan Watts, transcendental meditation, Krishnamurti, various yoga instructors, basically picking up anything that fell off the Great Spiritual Babble Truck as it traveled coast to coast.

Also to assuage Mr. Death, during these years I discovered my perfect career. I learned about medicine, disease by disease, writing them up as mysteries and updating them with biologic or pharmacologic clues, which I hoped would some day solve these murderous or painful cases.  I knew for sure my work was just a stopgap measure against the ultimate end, but satisfying nonetheless. 

So now I have left behind this career, my childrearing, my sexual falls to come North, to my roots, to build a house and, eventually, to sleep.  My birthday this week recalculates once again the increasingly smaller percentage of my remaining average life span.  When Michael and I get together with our same-age friends, the conversation often drifts to how we might off ourselves at the end if we get really, really stupid.  I talk agreement, but I probably won't do it.  I love my life.  I've loved it since I was in the womb.  I am going to be very sad when it's over and I probably will be inanely eager to see what happens next as I get really really stupid. 

Meditation is annoying and very hard,  but it is the only broom I have that can sweep the brain clean. Although most of the time, it's listening to words rattling like bones in a spiritual desert, every once in a great while Something Happens. On the land that we bought here is a ridge, more like a big rock hump, which has a long view of the Catskills to the west.  Because of the easement we established, no one can ever build a house on that rock, including us, but they can meditate on it, or pray to Grandpa God, or just sit.  

I've stopped looking for spiritual reassurances, either from the West or the East.  It's just me on the hill now, cross-legged, and sitting there with Mr. Death. On occasion, when the mind clears out something wordless shrugs me into a space of overwhelming Niceness, which, at that moment, includes everything: me, the birds, the rocks, the trees, every creature, human or not, alive or dead, whom I've loved and not loved, whom I failed to protect.  This is followed by the delusional notion that the adventure may not be over.  I stand up and walk down the hill, the noisy brain immediately reinstalled, and I am once again arm and arm with the inscrutable Mr. Death. However, increasingly, after such meditations, I notice he's getting pudgy, his hair is thinning, he may need reading glasses, and we are beginning to converse.

Loaves, Fishes, and Potato Salad

"Only one! You take only one. Everyone has to eat." George yells at a tall lanky older guy who is leaning over a carton filled with boxes of cereal, clutching two in his hand. He scowls back at George, drops one, and moves on. A short stocky woman takes his place and puzzles through the Cheerios and Rice Krispies. A woman holding a small boy's hand reaches into a box of small packaged cakes and hands him one. At the end of the line, two women discuss whether the lettuce is too wilted.

 It's Friday at the Hudson Salvation Army Center, where, along with the daily lunch, the weekly food pantry helps feed its neighbors. The pantry is open from 8 to 10 AM, although some people start lining up outside at five, leaning against the front wall where there is no shelter, even in icy nasty weather. The only requirement is that you sign in and give your address and the number of people in your family. The tables that will later be set for lunch are now laid end to end, lined with a train of boxes and cartons containing the donations of the week: cans of soup, stews, and vegetables, boxes of cereal and bags of edible chemistry, fresh produce, frozen meats, and baked goods.

The donors for both the daily lunches and the weekly food pantry include local supermarkets, businesses, non-profits, and farms. The food varies depending on the season or what a donor wants to get rid of that week, either from overstock or customer disinterest. In addition to the pedestrian carrots, onions, potatoes, and apples, the pantry also occasionally provides more exotic treats, like frozen tripe and chicken livers, raspberries, mangoes, avocadoes, chilies, and artichokes. Hawthorne Valley, a local organic farm, once contributed cartons of fresh goat cheese and yogurt because there was an error in the labels. (Confession: I took some home.) There are also, of course, the awful products that don't sell. For a whole month we were graced with bags and bags of Lay's cappuccino potato chips, one of several loathsome winners of its contest, "Do Us a Flavor", in which Americans who prefer dinner munched out of a bag can suggest a subhuman idea for a new potato chip flavor. I can hardly wait for P&J and lobster roll.

 Jill, the Hudson Salvation Army manager, is often at the door letting in, one by one, those still waiting outside, occasionally greeting a regular with a sardonic tease. Jill isn't a Salvation Army member; she's Super Woman. A few years ago, the Army was about to close down the place, but decided instead to hire her to run the kitchen and pantry as a service center for the poor, with no evangelical mission. Jill is attractive, blonde, and a townie. She knows everybody and cajoles, bullies, and shames enough local businessmen, kids, and friends from kindergarten to ring bells at Christmas and convinces enough local farms and stores to contribute food, so that at the end of the year the center makes money. With a cheerful toughness she subdues diners who are about to go off the skids on too many morning beers or weird drug mixtures and kindly but scarily reprimands volunteers who don't wear their hairnets or sneak too much free food into their bags without asking her first. Best boss ever! She has recently begun to tease me incessantly about the number of pots and utensils I use. I finally feel part of the team!

When the pantry line has dwindled down so that it only needs one or two volunteers to deal with it, Sue, the primary cook and the only driver among us, and Charlie, the primary volunteer and also the best human being in the world, take off in the center's white cargo van heading for Walmart and Hannaford, the center's two biggest donors, for the bi-weekly pick-up. When they return, the van often packed to the roof, anyone working or volunteering that day helps unload the boxes. Charlie, who is 70ish and about five-four, cheerfully hauls out fifty-pound boxes of frozen beef. Everyone else has injuries, but they all carry. Sue has had two spinal surgeries. George is stiff with back pain, and Jermaine is in line for two shoulder surgeries from repetitive stress injuries suffered on the assembly line at Kaz, a local industry that pulled out a couple years ago and headed for Mexico and cheaper labor. (Some of the many employees it left behind are still pantry and lunch regulars.) The boxes are stacked, weighed and recorded in the lunch room, and Charlie tries to get them stored away as fast as possible so that we can clean the tables in time for the daily meal, which starts at 11:30.

 Every Friday and Wednesday, also a pick-up day, hundreds of pounds of donated food gets levered, piled, and shoved into one cooler, a couple of freezers, and a smallish pantry, with not enough time or volunteers to organize them so that the best ingredients are readily available. Every meal becomes a challenging decision based on whatever we can reach that day that could make up the daily rations for 20 to 40 diners, the number of whom depend on whether it's early in the month (food stamps have come in) or at the end (food stamps have been used up.) By the end of the week, most of the perishable food has been used or given away and the storage areas are ready for the next tsunami of donations.

 Since Sue is busy doing the pantry and driving the van I like working Fridays best because I sometimes get to cook the main course. Usually she has prepared most of the food the day before, or she and Jill have already gotten the meat into the ancient oven long before I come in at eight o'clock, but sometimes she'll have left me trays of thawing fish, big tubes of ground beef, or chicken strip to inspire me. A couple weeks ago I cobbled a beef stew together using extra steak and vegetables from lunch the day before. This week I took filets of tilapia and salmon, drenched them in egg and buttermilk dressing, dipped them in bread crumbs. and baked them. My recent triumph was a classic potato salad that included 25 hard boiled eggs, three pounds of bacon and some pickles, celery, and onion, all soaked in a combination of mayonnaise and yogurt dressing, livened up with two tubes of dill and a handful of dried thyme.

Even if Sue is cooking, the rest of us fill in with making salads, cutting vegetables, and offering advice. It's always a team effort, and everyone talks all the time. Sue just bought a mobile home and she shares photos of the newly painted walls and kitchen. Rhea reports her latest kid triumphs and berates the lousy Hudson school system. Jermaine, wedged in the corner on the only stool, craftily waits until one of the women innocently calls out, "That's too thick," or "Use the long one," an opportunity for him to comment, "That's what she said." (The kitchen humor is typically at this level regardless of the source.) George, a fellow ex-New Yorker, remembers his lost years in retail selling high-end fabric, describing with wistful nostalgia the extraordinary Scalamandre silk tiger velvet he once sold to clothe the couches of the very, very rich. He takes knitting breaks when there's nothing to dice, slice or cut. (In fact, George is knitting me a fabulous small teal purse, and we've been trying to figure out if he can scale it and make money on Etsy.)

When lunch starts, Jermaine and Charlie do most of the serving. As the diners come in, Charlie calls in the count from the doorway. "Five!" So if I'm at the stove, I'll pull down five plastic plates and try to guess how much to portion out from the trays of roasted meats and cauldrons of rice or potatoes and vegetables so that the food lasts through the hour. It almost always does, and so we have left-overs to pack up for ourselves if we want and always for Charlie, who walks from his apartment downtown to the center every day – even throughout this awful winter -- and is in the kitchen by four or five in the morning to set up and is the last to leave. He has no family that I know of and started volunteering after he retired, when the decades old toy store he had worked at shut down. Unlike the rest of us, Charlie says little, but I've never seen him angry or mean, and when he smiles, which is often, it is beatific.

With its one daily meal for its 30-odd guests, the Hudson Salvation Army Center is a kid's idea of a restaurant, a cartoon drawn with broad strokes and in two-dimensions. Each of the six tables are sparsely dressed with small fists of forks and knives wrapped in paper napkins, plastic cups tipped upside down beside them, two pitchers of water and juice anchoring each end, and a tiny pot of viciously bright plastic flowers set in the middle. The kitchen is a flea market of weary whisks, spoons, and spatulas, dull knives and can openers. A huge meat slicer that no one uses takes up most of one counter. A battered trio of sinks barely fit the sled-wide oven trays, wide-mouthed monster pots, and plastic salad bowls the size of koi ponds, so when we wash them, water spews everywhere. The venerable black professional stove has six burners that can boil five gallons of water in 10 minutes but are so close together that just three pots fit at one time. We have to triple any baking or roasting time, because its senile oven takes about an hour to stoke itself up to a max of 350.

But it's always fun and I've never worked with a better bunch of people. I don't actually serve lunch to the diners so I only know the regulars by sight and gossip: the deaf guy who does sign language with a companion while they eat, Chris who has to chew very slowly or else she chokes, Cookie who always pops his head in to thank us (notably complimenting my potato salad), the ketchup guy, the stoned and irritating woman who complains about the food so often that I'm really happy when she likes it, the guy who doesn't eat beef, the guy who doesn't eat pork, Carlos who was put into a mental home when he was twelve and let out twenty years later, the homeless guy who lives in the park, the cute sculptor who comes in at the end. Last Friday, when we served my tilapia and salmon, a couple of regulars complained that they didn't eat fish. One of the volunteers that day said, "How can they gripe about the food when it's free?" But I was pleased. It meant they felt entitled to good food, and why shouldn't they, just like any diner anywhere in any establishment, even at our restaurant at the back end of the Universe. We're here to serve.

Building the Live-in Green Machine: Stage One

I've lived in apartments my entire adult life, and when we first started talking about building our own house, I pictured it pretty much like my kindergarten crayon house drawings.  Four walls, a pitched roof, windows blocked out in rectangles, and flowers with giant petals lined up under a Rothko strip of sky, a perky sun plastered to the right.  To build this early fantasy house, men would come in and lift up the walls and nail them against a frame.  I'd seen barn raising in movies. I know how it's done. 

This concept became a bit more complicated, but not by much, when we started looking at glass and steel modules designed by an architect in Minnesota and pre-made in a factory.  I envisioned trucks delivering three fully loaded house boxes, which a crane would surgically pick up and drop gently into place.  I'd walk in and start cooking.  I wasn't totally a house moron.  During college I had helped build sets one season at the Woodstock summer theater, so I knew that one had to look at floor plans and elevations to figure out where the futon and the bookcases would go.  So easy peasy.  

Wrong.  Building a new house, and particularly a green one, is constructing a machine, with nearly every element as complicated and inter-related as a Victorian steam engine. Screwing up one part can screw up everything, so Michael and I have to understand every inch of it – and we both have to agree on it all! 

Let's start with the boxes themselves.  There will be three: two floors of a main house and a guest house seated on top of a garage built on site.  The modules will be sided with Corten steel, a magic substance that begins rusting and then stops after a few months, the rusty layer then providing protection.  At that point, they will either look like Serra sculptures or abandoned warehouses In New Jersey.  

Next, comes the insulation that lines the boxes.  As it turns out, every builder has a different opinion on the best type and there are dozens.  We can have reflective insulating systems or fiberglass, mineral wool, and plastic or natural fibers that come rolled up in a blanket.  Foam boards can attach to the walls or foam or cellulose can be blown into them. Part of the decision on what to use relies on their R value, an equation that measures their ability to block heat conduction; the higher the value the better the insulation. The ideal R values vary depend on where you live, what kind of heat source your have, and whether you're insulating walls, ceiling, floors, or crawl spaces (we can skip those).  We found R-value calculators on the Great Google and were certain we wanted spray foam, which has great R numbers and seals a space beautifully, but the first factory bidding on our modules likes foam board and fiberglass all knitted together with tape. Another factory that comes in with a bid might prefer hay-stuffed walls.  Whatever wins has to be right.  After living through this winter in a barn with negative R values, I want a heat-holding insulation fist. 

Windows naturally leak air so you want those to have good R values too, triple pane being the best.  And with windows, it's not just their heat-trapping virtues, but where, how many, and what type they are. Michael would live in a glass box and I would live in a cave with a tiny skylight.  We have managed to suffer through this particular pane, but now another decision awaits us.  Windows no longer just go up and down, like the double hung of my youth. And they don't have to be rectangles. We can peer through round, peak or rake headed, Gothic, oval, or quadrilateral glass. They can fold out like awnings or shove out or pull in as casements. On the second floor we'll probably use the fabulous Loewen Access windows, whose gear mechanism has the complexity of an old-fashioned Swiss watch.  They twirl 180 degrees, go up, go down, and if we paid enough, could probably transport us into space. On the first floor, we might go for casement windows, but whether they push out or pull in is still up for grabs. 

And no one is ignoring what goes on inside those boxes. We spent a dispiriting day last week on IKEA Road in Paramus wandering among kitchen cabinets, clutching the plans we had made and printed out from the monster store's website after a few bitter fights over drawer sizes.  When I checked this particular IKEA branch out on Yelp, one short comment read: "It's where relationships come to die."  

By the way, it's astonishing how stupidly passionate one can get over whether kitchen cabinet doors should be white or off-white, or if a window should be pushed in or pulled out, or if the walkway is covered between two of the modules. I have been heard shrieking over whether an inside door should have one, four, or six panels, and before this process I didn't even know doors had panels. Fortunately, our marriage so far has weathered all these decisions.  

And next, we view the Green Giants, the systems that will support our house machine. The engineered flooring will conceal PEX coils snaking back and forth carrying radiant heat generated by an intricate collaboration between geothermal loops dug deep into the earth and solar electricity. To figure how much solar we will need we calculated the amount of kilowatts for every single electrical device -- large and small -- that we expect to be using in our new spaceship.  (The great Google has websites for doing that, too.)  I now know that at .18 per kilowatt the annual cost for my toaster is $25, for the two desktop computers it's $175, and my crockpot costs me $35.  However, geothermal will be the monster kilowatt sucking machine and will require about the same amount of electricity that we'll be using for the whole house.  So, that means we need two giant solar slabs, and they won't just lie there sunbathing on the roof.  Two trackers seated to the southeast of the house will move 40 solar panels back and forth, and up and down depending on the location of that perky sun moving across the sky.  

Yesterday we met with Pete, our contractor, who seems happy with the initial state of the architect's design and the general layout of the land.  Michael and I have reached agreement on the kitchen cabinets, the number of windows, the passage way between the main and guest house, and our solar slabs, which I believe will also find evidence of extraterrestrial life.  We opened a bottle of wine last night and celebrated the first stage of this adventure.  With luck, the snow will eventually melt and the digging can begin for stage two.

Winter Rules, Like It or Not

"I like winter here."

"Me too."

"I mean I really like winter here.  Not just tolerate it."

"Really?"  Coming from Michael, who was born and raised in Northern New Mexico, where winters can be cold, but are also dry, this was a totally unexpected preference. Snow around Albuquerque usually only laces the Sandias, looming to the East and framing a sky massive with dramatic and enveloping light, even during the shortest days.  Now, that's likeable.  Winters here in the upper Hudson valley are giant weather box stores, their long corrugated skies enclosing us in cold steely air, their aisles of road and short hills selling us nothing but cheap snow and ice.  I like winter here because I grew up in it and still bear those joy-loaded memories of no-school days and winter sports.  Michael mostly stays inside, except to venture out in the snow blower to clear our driveways and head to town for wine or dinner. So what's to like about winter in Hudson?  Some possibilities:

Checking the Weather.  Except in rare instances, weather in Manhattan serves only to create the day's wardrobe; here, it is the day. We check the weather obsessively – every few hours on three apps:  NOAA (the US weather service, which gives a week's worth of forecasting), Dark Skies (predicts our microclimate over the next few minutes through the following week), and Weatherlink (connects to a small station installed near our barn by Michael and our landlord/friend Dave that provides information on current and past weather right outside our door).  Weather's unpredictability here feeds my anxiety, which seems to be essential in keeping my rabbit mind alert, aware, and not bored. During my happy (no irony) decades in NYC, it was fed on dark streets by the antsy fear of bandits unmoored by expensive and brain-eating drugs. But after vigilant cops and cheap sleep-inducing heroin had softened up the streets, it was time to move where Mother Nature was the mugger, and my underlying anxiety could be constantly served by her acts of climate change vengeance.

Eating and Drinking and, If Not Merry, Being Less Sullen. Each morning I wake out of my daily bear-like slumber considering dinner.  Winter opens up my freezer, summer's treasure chest.  Out come the pureed pumpkin or butter beans for soup, or the long sweet green bean pods, bitter kale, or broccoli spig stems to accompany the roasts, or San Marzano tomato sauce for guilt-slathering on pasta, to dress the pre-grilled defrosted eggplant slices, or to thicken soups and stews, or, of course, packets of green New Mexico chilies, the fat thick ones to fill with cheese for rellenos or the messier thinner chilies to chop up into sauces.  No dinner is cooked without oil or butter.  Nor is it ever without a couple gleaming glasses of dry white wine.  The extra five pounds these winter meals bring are worth it (except for the falling-and-not-getting-up part).  Most nights we eat in by ourselves, but not every one, which brings me to the next winter routine, perhaps the most important one, and maybe why Michael likes winter. 

Seeing People Really or Virtually.  The darkest winter I ever spent was on an Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where its black rich loam was mixed with snow by the incessant wind snaking across the endless plain and oozed under doorways and windowsills as "snirt." Temperatures dropped to way past zero regularly, and it was against the law not to help a stalled traveler on those desolate highways.  I never had more fun or made better friends than I did that year.  Lesson learned for bad winters in Hudson. Good friends and family bring color and sound to this gray silent season, which make them even dearer than in the warm seasons, when we take their sensory effects for granted.   Roads permitting, I cook for friends at least once a week. Also, once or twice weekly we have dinner at DABA, sitting at the bar, listening to stories by the staff and other regulars.  I scrub potatoes and chop onions two mornings a week at the Salvation Army kitchen with some of the best and most interesting people I've ever met. Michael and I are also getting to know the eccentric indigenous members of our local loser political tribe.  And, once more with gratitude to the Internet, we connect regularly to our kids through email and messaging and skim the surface lives of our friends and relatives through Facebook.  And that brings me to the next likeable winter routine.

Browsing and Streaming.  We have no television, but the Internet and its fabulous device chums provide endless brain-numbing nearly guilt-free distraction during the long dark, cold evenings. I share with almost every woman I respect a love of grisly Northern European murder mysteries in all media: books, TV shows, movies available on Kindle, Netflix, Amazon Smile, Hulu, ITunes.  Michael enjoys browsing Ducati forums and looking at the latest trends in electric cars.  To our everlasting shame, we both watch streams of The Blacklist and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.  And his work and my occasional contracts are all screen based.  Most of our time then is spent indoors and most of that is staring at light disguised as characters and images.  We do, however, occasionally venture out and squint at actual light. 

Getting Outside and Playing in the Snow.  As a kid in upstate New York, I loved winter sports-- jumping moguls at inexpensive local ski areas, building bonfires next to a frozen pond for night skating, or gliding through woods after an ice storm. When we first started weekending up here, I bought skates for the pond across the road and cross-country skies for the hills outside the barn with the idea of reviving a chunk of my childhood. Unfortunately, over the past ten years, the pond has rarely provided a skin hard and clear enough for skating, and the snow is usually either too skimpy or too heavy for cross country skiing.  And, there's the falling thing.  

This year, sufficient snow has not been the problem, so last week I trapped my boots into my bindings and trudged off the sidewalk into the back yard drifts. Immediately, two feet of powder amputated the bottom half of my legs. With no visual cues for my skis, I dutifully wallowed forward on my knee stubs for about thirty feet. Ugh. Ick. Enough ski fun.  Turning, turning (very, very awkwardly) in the gyre and hoping the center would hold, I pushed back to the barn, finally popping my skis up over a tiny plowed bank beside the sidewalk. As I slowly slid off it, I lost balance. Gravity and age, having shaped my body into a plump pear, now, like Harry and/or David, seated it solidly into a soft gift box of snow. I couldn't get up and I couldn't shift position. I tried to release my binders with my poles but I couldn't get any leverage.  Fifteen feet away Michael was zooming about in the snow blower clearing the driveway, happily encased in the soundless, warm tractor cab. I thrashed, screamed, and waved my poles at him, but he remained oblivious, focused raptor-like on great shoots of ice and snow hurling to the side. (I think that's what he likes about winter.) I gave up and considered taking my boots off and walking in my socks back to the apartment, when he finally looked up, turned the engine off, and rescued me. 

So, probably no skating or skiing for the rest of this winter.  But there's a back up, not so much a winter sport as a chore. So that Michael and I can at least share something outside, I bought two sets of snowshoes, tepid sources of fun, but it's really hard to fall over in them and they do fulfill the dreary exercise requirement.  So a couple days ago we trudged on our Yeti feet down to the future building site and tracked into the snow the outline for our imaginary house and pond. And that was very likeable, and leads to the next more likeable winter activity.

Planning the House, Meadow, and Garden.  During this Arctic winter, we have spent some of its time anticipating the New House, fiddling with our architect's revisions and our engineer's ideas for the curves of our driveway and pond. Hope for green energy glimmers from calls to solar providers and consults with an HVAC expert (also a neighbor) on radiant heat and geothermal loops.  Even better, an email from Barbara, our wild flower meadow consultant, says it's not too early to start thinking about buying seed. In fact, I already have the seeds to my vegetable garden and I'm updating last year's notes.  I can't think about these things too much, however, because they tend to produce delight and excitement in the future, which then replace my chronic anxiety and pessimism, which, I believe, are essential for a truly happy life. Which brings me to my final likeable winter routine.

Meditating or, Anyway, Sitting Still. Winter slows time.  Which can be annoying, as in, "God, when will this ever end?"  But it can also be a comfort for those of us who now measure it out carefully. A winter day may be boosted by a singular event (soup kitchen, dinner at DABA, a political meeting, a consult on the future house, cooking for friends, long phone call with kids) but it is always surrounded by silence or it may be determined only by silence. During the day Michael and I rarely add additional sound to its soft white stillness while we're in the apartment working, browsing, or streaming. I also may meditate for a half hour or so in the early morning, ideally with my cat Killick curled up within my inadequately opened lotus.  This daily mental experience of absorbing winter's soundlessness and lack of light brings me closer to death's neighborhood but paradoxically reduces my chronic anxiety about life's end (which, of course, is what all my anxiety is or ever has been about) and even suggests joy – not the dithery anticipatory hobgoblin delight of my youth – but something subtle and underlying, vaguely resonating light and affection, something simply good lurking just beneath the cold and the dark.

We're now up to a couple feet of snow covering a nice thick bed of ice.  We just dodged a sleet/ice-storm bullet and anticipate a weekend of subzero temperatures and "life-threatening" winds.  As long as the power in the barn holds, what's not to like?