A New Year

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 morning trip to the farmers market.  Chloe the baker was there with scones and bagels and rye bread.  The nice family from Black Willow farm was there with eggs, but we didn’t need any this week since Aviva gave us eleven eggs yesterday before they headed off to someplace warm for a couple of months.  Heller Farm was there as always, with apples, potatoes, mushrooms, and hot house kale and spinach.  There are no lines or crowds to complain about at the farmers in January, but there are friendly faces of neighbors who stay through the winter. We are hatted and scarved and gloved and booted – kinsmen.

I think about how beautiful it is here almost all the time.  I love the winter landscape, the visual simplicity of it.  Driving home from Oneonta yesterday the afternoon sun was gleaming on the snowy fields.  Rows of tawny stubs of last summer’s corn perforated the perfect white.  The Susquehanna, between white banks, was as dark a green as it could be without being black.  In the winter, each thing is visible, and each seems more important. Each house is hunkered down in the cold, some keeping families warm, some offering little comfort.  It’s a hard time to be poor, to worry about the heating bill and the cost of a new coat for a growing child.  There hasn’t been enough snow at one time to provide work for folks with snow plows who need the income.  The terrible unfairness of income inequality stands out in the winter too, more visible and more painful.

Thursday 1/9/2025

At the Gym this morning a friend said, “It feels like we’re living inside a snow globe.”  Yes.  I had been looking out the huge south facing windows of the gym for 20 minutes on the elliptical, and that was exactly what it looked like. For most of these first few days of the new year the sky has been full of snow.  Most of the time it has been the tiny flakes, often just blown horizontally off roofs and trees and lawns.  Sometimes there have been the larger lazy flakes drifting down or swirling.  The air around us has been visible and visibly in motion nearly every minute.  And it’s cold.  Poor Charlie suffers.  We pile on clothes, long johns, lined boots, hoods pulled up over knit hats.  We haven’t found anything Charlie will wear, so the best we can do is wrap him in a blanket and settle him near the heater when he comes in shivering.

Yesterday we drove the 23 miles to Brimstone Bakery in Sharon Springs.  The roads had been plowed, but snow kept drifting across them in the wind and there were times you had to use your imagination to guess where the lanes were.  The great advantage to having to drive slowly is that I get to see details I usually miss.  One stretch of route 20 is cut through layered rock.  In October someone put dozens of pumpkins on the ledges, most with carved faces.  Some of them remain, collapsed under age and snow, out of reach of hungry deer.  Driving by at this slower speed it is clear what a job it was to place them all.  A labor of love.

In the winter we’re more aware of who is responsible for each road – the Town, the County, or the State.  Who has kept up with the plowing, who has fallen behind.  Out in the country, the government’s role in maintaining roads is more visible, more important.  City people complain about potholes and understand that their existence is a shortcoming of government.  But it’s less personal and less important.  Here, we know the highway superintendent, we know his budget for keeping his aging fleet on the road.  We vote for him, or in some cases try to find someone to run against him.  Maintaining the roads is not the work of some vast bureaucracy, it’s the job of Bill and his crew.  And there are endless complaints about how the work is done.  The roads join us – Cooperstown and Sharon Springs.  Cherry Valley and Oneonta.  Our towns and villages are not self contained.  We need to get places.

And when we get to Brimstone Bakery, Anthony is there to greet us – just his second customers after his holiday break.  Coming in from the bitter cold the bakery is warm and smells fabulous.  I had a spinach and mushroom hand pie and Jay had an egg and sausage sconewich.  We shared an apple cranberry turnover and took home a crab and herb quiche.  Every morsel of it was delicious, and made more so by Anthony’s friendship.  It’s a connection Peter and Aviva made for us, part of the web of our world here.  Totally worth the drive.  Living in a snow globe makes us choosier about our outings, but there’s no question about a trip through the cold to Brimstone’s warmth.

Happy New Year to friends and family near and far.