Heat

By three in the afternoon it’s too hot to do anything but sit directly in front of the fan.  My brain is sluggish, but I’ve signed up for a creative writing class that starts next Thursday, and I thought I ought to start getting warmed (!) up by writing a daily journal.  We don’t have air conditioning here, but then, I can’t remember the last time I lived in a house that did have air conditioning.  In Palo Alto there were perhaps three or four days each summer when air conditioning seemed like a nice idea, but a fan or a walk along the Baylands out in the breeze was enough to get us through.  On Sunnyhill, in Hartwick, there was always a breeze that kept hot days manageable.  But here, with several days of 100 degree temperatures in a row, the house is an oven by afternoon.  Charlie and Hazel stretch out on the floor and do nothing but breathe.  They’re good role models.

I was thinking about Sunnyhill, about opening the living room windows as a summer day warmed. In the morning, before the birds sought shelter from a hot day, the air was full of birdsong, of the cawing of crows, of the honking of geese.  Nicole, the young nurse who rented the studio apartment above our garage, visited here last week.  She had moved back to California and was working at a hospital in South Lake Tahoe before they were evacuated in front of the Caldor fire.  She stopped in to visit on her way down to see her parents in Santa Clara and figure out what was next for her.  Naturally, we talked about Sunnyhill, about the birds and especially about the geese.

We could see neighbors at a distance from Sunnyhill, one house up the hill on the far side of the pond to the north, a couple of houses to the west across Gulf Road, and Brian’s house to the south when the leaves were off the trees.  We could hear the sounds of neighbors, running a mower or a snow blower, or a chainsaw.  But during the warmer half of the year, the geese were the neighbors I was most aware of.  We moved to Sunnyhill in January of 2018, and the arrival of the geese that spring marked the end of the test – could we manage upstate winters.  The geese told us we’d made it.  Several flocks honked overhead, completely changing the soundscape from winter silence.  A few of the flocks landed on the pond for a rest, whether it was frozen or partly thawed.  One pair stayed.  Jay promptly named them Fred and Ethel.

We could often see Fred and Ethel walking across the ice, and it wasn’t long before we saw them on open water and exploring the hill where the snow had melted.  They were often close to the driveway looking for bugs, and when I walked down to Gulf Road they would lift their heads and watch me.  If I came too close for their comfort, they would bob their heads up and down on those long, sturdy necks and Fred would honk and hiss as they waddled away from me.  The sight and sound of them was an essential part of that first spring, the promise that warmth would return, that days would get longer, that grass would need to be mowed.  And then, as summer arrived, they hatched their chicks. They were the main entertainment on the hill, the goslings growing week by week, chasing along behind Ethel with Fred guarding the rear. Fred and Ethel were successful that summer, and the following three summers we lived there, raising their broods to adulthood, ready to fly off into the autumn sky.

Having geese for neighbors brought so many things into focus, the seasons they measured, the quiet they interrupted, the big open space all around us that they inhabited with us.  There was life everywhere we looked during the goose half of the year, but the geese were the main daily event.  We’d see the work of the beavers eating away our trees and damming the outflow of the pond.  We’d see an occasional flock of turkeys, and once in a while the shy fox.  We saw swallows and all the songbirds every day.  But the geese were big, and interesting, and there every day. And they came first at the end of winter.

I know the heat will end here, and that across the country Fred and Ethel will be getting ready to leave Sunnyhill with the goslings we saw born there this summer.  I’m sure I’ll see changes in the part of the world I live in now.  But I don’t expect the drama of the departure of geese or the fall of the first snow.  I’m sure I’ll be breaking out sweaters in time – what a lovely thought.  But my long silk underwear will stay boxed in the basement of our house in Cooperstown for two winters, and we won’t be needing snow shovels to clear a path so that Charlie can get out to pee.  I’m so lucky to have lived on Sunnyhill with Jay and Charlie and Hazel and the geese. And now, despite the heat, I’m so lucky to live here in what Jay calls our groovy little house on our groovy little street.

Shana tova to all my dear friends and family who celebrate the New Year.