This weekend we got the news we’ve been awaiting for eight months. Baby Zev, Tamar’s first grandchild is home with his parents. Zev was born in July, about two months early, and had been in the NICU since then with a series of challenges for his tiny digestive system. But he’s free of tubes at…
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I spend two minutes every morning looking out the tall window facing west in the bathroom. I know it’s two minutes because of the timer on my electric toothbrush. The window is only about 18 inches wide, but it runs from barely a foot above the floor to about a foot under the ceiling. The…
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We are not hibernating, although I certainly understand the impulse. With temperatures dropping below zero and not getting above 20 for several days the world is brittle and crunchy. The deer leave tracks with sharp edges where their hooves break through the frozen crust of snow. When there is sun, the hard snow gleams. Coming…
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January 4, 2025 There was snow in the air nearly all day today, falling, blowing around, or both. A snowy Saturday has a special kind of quiet to it. There’s minimal road noise, since folks who don’t have to be out stay home. The wind has the crows quiet too. Our only outing was a…
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My sister Tamar wrote that in the Hamlet of Amenia where we spent our summers there is a new florist in the store where Dube’s used to be. A wormhole of memory opens. The Dubes were an older couple when I knew them, around our grandmother’s age. They had a narrow, dark, dusty dry goods…
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It’s a crunchy night at 23 degrees heading down towards the teens. We don’t expect to see the upside of freezing this week. We had about six inches of snow on Thanksgiving Day. It’s compacted down and the boot prints are frozen. The world is slippery, and it’s time to be careful on foot and…
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We had our last League event on Friday, with a voter information table in the lobby of the hospital. Our final tally for the season is contact with 2,300 potential voters. We reported one case of voter intimidation, and one case of a problem with access to the early voting site, but otherwise, things are…
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Fog in the Mohawk River Valley. The trees, brown, red, orange, yellow, and some still green, stand out against the white fog. October slides down toward Halloween. The valley is so beautiful and the river carries its history. Long before Europeans showed up this was the superhighway for a big area, flowing east for 150…
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Is it my imagination, or has autumn begun unfolding more quickly this year? The yellow of the goldenrod is echoed in leaves turning yellow in the trees above. The miracle of chlorophyll deserting the leaves seems to be progressing quickly. At the start of last week there was just a whiff of fall, but now…
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