Gone

Yesterday, the crocuses were pushing their way up through the snow, and our geese (which you can just see at the side of the road) were searching under the snow for bugs to eat.  Today, most of that snow is gone. Venus and the moon were brilliant last night in the deep blue evening sky.  It was the first clear night in several days, and lovely to see stars again. This morning the sky was still perfectly clear, and I could watch the light move down the western hills as the sun rose. It was a chilly 25 degrees, but the temperature started rising with the sun – 40 now, and heading for 60 according to the forecast.  There are still patches of snow, but even most of them will be gone by the end of the day.  We leave for California on Wednesday and I don’t know if we’ll see leaves on the trees before we go. We’ll come back, two crucial weeks later, to a changed landscape.

I’m very excited about the trip – mostly looking forward to seeing family and friends.  And I’m excited for Vi’s book readings at Beth Am and at the book group.  Since we’re leaving Charlie with Dan, Mary and Jasmine, I was able to find us a place in Palo Alto on AirBnB – an Eichler, 10 minutes from Thomas Drive.  Kind of weird to stay in someone else’s house in our own neighborhood. We’ll get our pickup Thursday morning and drive down to meet Carrie and Blythe in Gilroy.  Carrie will drive my Prius up there, and Aviva and I will drive it to Liz’s while Jay drives Carrie back home. So our first day will be busy and full of family.

Just now, three deer made their way into Zen’s field where new grass is growing.  Zen is indifferent to them, and visa versa. The snow is gone from our back steps, and I can almost see it melting on the lawn as I watch. How different it will be when the challenge is keeping cool rather than keeping warm, when it’s sandals in the mudroom, not boots.

Spring brings so much new life, but there is death too. My sisters and I got an email a couple of days ago from Shana Zaslow, one of the “Amenia kids” we grew up with.  She wrote to tell us that Jerry Thomases, the last of the group of grown ups from those days, had died at 100.  I hadn’t seen Jerry in many years, but the news of his death brought back the sound of his big laugh and such vivid memories of that whole group of friends who gathered in Amenia when we were kids. We were spectacularly lucky to get to hang out with those grown ups, to listen to their conversations and their arguments.  I don’t think there were any Republicans in the group, but they brought a diversity of opinions and perspectives.  Most of them had been Socialists or Communists in their youth, but as they aged in different professions and different surroundings, their ideas branched out over a fairly wide spectrum.  And they loved to argue politics! This was the cold war era, and later Viet Nam, and there was plenty to argue about.  I grew up listening to them, with the tacit understanding that grown ups cared about politics, read about it, thought about it, and had strong opinions about it.  I was well into adulthood myself before I began to understand how unusual and how privileged that environment was.  Not only were we surrounded by intelligent, well informed adults, but they had the leisure to have long weekend discussions, and Amenia created a space where kids were often on the outer edge of adult conversation. No one was staring at a screen.

Sunnyhill is not Amenia in so many ways.  The geography is so different – a hill top as opposed to the bowl that the house and lake sat in. And Sunnyhill, though it has a measure of privacy, is not hidden from the world the way Amenia was.  But also, although we have company here and will have more, there will never be the sort of summer community we had there, with families staying for a week or two throughout the summer. It was partly the times, but also the situation – with Dad being in the city during the week and Mom not driving, we needed another family to stay with us all the time and there were two houses to accommodate two, and sometimes three families. Unlike Jay and I, my parents were young adults when they bought Amenia, with young children, and with friends who were young and had young families. Their frame of reference was the Depression and WWII.  How sweet the peace and prosperity they lived in must have felt. It felt sweet to us kids, but we didn’t know then that life could be anything but sweet and safe, full of loving adults.  And now the last of them is gone.