The Fenimore Art Museum, one of the surprising jewels of Cooperstown, has held a series of zoom lectures focusing on different parts of their collection. The last one I attended was less about the collection, focusing instead on the life of Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James. One of Susan’s many gifts to posterity, and…
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For weeks after the snow melts there are only damp dead leaves from last year’s bounty along Averill Road. Then one day there are forget me nots, brilliant blue in the dull leaf litter, each with its golden center. A whole cloud of them appears overnight in the annual magic of spring. My mother loved…
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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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