Here today

This morning when Charlie and I walked down the hill, and again before lunch, the driveway was covered with little slugs. They were no more than two inches long, slender, with two little horns on the front of what could scarcely be called a head – just the leading edge of the little body. At each step I took there were slugs and slugs and slugs, making their sluggish way across the driveway. But tonight, after dinner, there was not a single slug. Was their migration over? Had birds eaten them? Did they accomplish their destinies? Up close, the natural world is full of mysteries.

Charlie, with his wise nose, is a good teacher. Stop, pay attention, examine carefully, don’t hurry. But I don’t follow his example of peeing on everything that was interesting enough to pause over. Our walks are a lovely part of my day and one of the joys of warm weather. We are at full summer now. The pink and white rocket that lined the roads in late spring are gone, replaced by tall bright orange day lilies mixed with blue bachelor buttons, white queen anne’s lace, and yellow buttercups. The fields are rich green, and the corn is up, perhaps waist high. The goslings are indistinguishable from the geese when I see them across the pond. The swallows and bluebirds that used our nesting boxes are gone, the babies fledged. I opened one of the vacated nesting boxes tonight and examined the beautifully woven, feather lined nest. A small miracle of home making.

Jay, Charlie, Hazel-tov and I have moved out of the studio above the garage, back into the main house. The house was only rented to summer baseball families for two weeks, but for a variety of reasons we spent six weeks in the studio. It was lovely, despite the minor inconvenience of packing our things away and moving up and back down. The studio is about 460 square feet, with beautiful views east and west, a fine kitchen/living room, a partly walled off bedroom area, and a bathroom. After spending the summer in our 16 foot trailer last year, the studio was luxuriously roomy. It was good to be reminded again how little we need. We got a small rolling desk and stool that could be easily stored in an otherwise unusable area and pulled out to serve as our office. We put in a chest bed with a bookshelf headboard. We brought up four cups, glasses, bowls, dishes, salad plates, forks, spoons and knives, and a small set of pots and pans and cooking tools. Jay put up a beautiful glass shelf resting on three pillars of glass bricks running the full length of the kitchen counter. There was room for everything. I could clean the whole place quite thoroughly in less than half an hour.

Our summer renters were lovely families, gone from early in the morning to late in the evening most days. But we decided that we won’t rent to summer people again. It’s too disruptive to move, even though the studio was so pleasant, and the market for summer rentals seems to be saturated. It’s not worth the trouble for just a couple of weeks. Now we have a traveling nurse living in the studio, and our plan for now is to continue to rent to travelers. They’re excellent tenants and the community needs them. The travelers usually get a three month contract, but are frequently renewed for another three months or more. Our current tenant is a lovely woman from Alabama, in her 50s. We scarcely know she’s here.

We love this place, but we’ve also come to realize how much work it is in every season. Jay, who is always thinking two moves ahead, paid attention when friends of ours who live on a big country property, told us that they had bought a house inside the village of Cooperstown. They rent it out for now, but it will be there for them when they decide it’s time to move into town for an easier life. We began looking at places in town, and in one of life’s beautiful coincidences, Jeje, the lovely owner of the small house right next door to Aviva and Peter moved into assisted living. Aviva guessed that the family would sell the house and put us in touch with Jeje’s local daughter. She was planning to put it on the market as soon as she finished clearing it out. We looked at it, decided it was just right for us, and made the final agreement today, with closing set for September. When the time comes, we’ll be at #6 Walnut, less than half a mile walk to the gym and less than a mile from everything we like in Cooperstown, but pleasantly off the major tourist routes. And we already love the neighbors! Aviva sends me pictures of deer in what will be our back yard. At 70, Jay and I have learned to look ahead realistically, and much as I would love to imagine staying here on the hill until I’m wheeled out, I know it’s not practical. It’s nice to know that we’re ready for what the future will bring at some point, and I think it will be pretty clear when it’s time. Like the slugs, we’ll have had our time on the hill, and we’ll be elsewhere. I hope the slugs are as happy as I’m sure we will be.