Winds

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 land to the west slopes away very steeply, so I look out into tall trees and treetops.  These last few days we’ve had very high winds, and I watch a kind of tree dance, with all but the stoutest trees swaying in time to the wind.  Even the trees with trunks that can stand still in this wind have crowns that sway, waving their branches.

When the trees are swaying so much the birds find shelter hidden from view.  But the deer are out below the trees, stepping through the frozen snow looking for something to eat.  There’s a small herd of them in the valley below us – I’ve seen as many as eight together.  They must have some sheltered space down there.  But they climb the hill most days, coming up to Louise’s driveway where Cynthia has spread peanuts for them, welcome calories in February.  They are often just setting out on their climb up the hill when I’m brushing my teeth and I love seeing them starting their day as I am starting mine.  I know it’s a hungry time for them, and these bitter cold nights can’t be a joy.  But they always seem so peaceful.  They’re quite safe on that hillside, with plenty of space and privacy.  The only real danger to them would be crossing route 28 which runs through the bottom of the valley, but I think they’re smart enough to stay on this side.

Cooperstown is bundled up or staying inside.  No one dawdles on the street.  We come in and shed boots and coats and gloves and scarves.  There is a different kind of joy to being inside together on a cold night, and the feeling of community is more intense.  Neighbors watch out for each other.  Mike Swatling, who lives in the last house on Averill, plows his own driveway and then, without being asked, plows Louise’s and ours.  He only accepted payment when Jay insisted.  Now that our garage is up, we’ve gotten our snow blower out of storage and Jay can use it to clear the ramp in the front of our house and the steep driveway down to the lower unit where Susan and Katie are gradually moving boxes in.  Their furniture will be moved in on Thursday, and that will be their first night sleeping here.  It’s already lovely to have them coming and going.

There are thick webs of relationships here in the Village.  When I told Susan that our next door neighbor was Louise Allen she said, oh of course, my mother knew her.  When Maryann and I were talking in the sauna after our aqua aerobics class and I told her that Susan St. John was our new tenant, she said, oh of course, her mom started the food pantry.  Our friends were doctors or teachers to generations of Cooperstown kids, and those kids, now grown with their own families, rode the school buses together.  Even if your family has not been here for generations you enter the web.  You know people from Rotary, or the League of Women Voters, from the gym or the farmers market or the senior center.  The joke is that a wrong number in Cooperstown takes 20 minutes while you figure out how you’re connected to the person you called by mistake.  I don’t know what the population drops to during the winter, but an already intimate town becomes more so as we face the weather together.

We are, of course, aware of the winds blowing through the larger world.  But for now, at least, we’re mostly buffered from the direct impacts.  I’m not burying my head in the sand, but I’m also not obsessing about things I can’t impact.  I’m working on getting people to run for local offices so that we keep our immediate democracy strong and so that we build the next cohort of candidates for higher offices.  I wrote a long screed about the current administration, but I realized that I wrote it only to get it out of my system, not so that I could enlighten or inspire anyone.  I don’t know anyone who couldn’t have written the same thing.  I write mostly to keep myself aware of how much good there is in the world and how lucky I am to be able to watch the deer climbing the hill under the trees the wind has possessed.