Welcome to Sunnyhill

A flash of red outside the bathroom window caught my eye, a beautiful male cardinal.  I watched him land in a raggedy old pine tree, and there above him sat a brilliant yellow Baltimore Oriole, the first I’ve seen this summer, although I’ve heard them.  The cardinals are here all year, color relief in the…
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My dear friend Leland Levy will be buried on Friday in California.  It’s hard to be so far away when there are losses.  Leland has a long and rich biography and a wide circle of friends and family who can speak about his life, a life well lived.  I met Le through my late husband…
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The Fenimore Art Museum, one of the surprising jewels of Cooperstown, has held a series of zoom lectures focusing on different parts of their collection.  The last one I attended was less about the collection, focusing instead on the life of Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James.  One of Susan’s many gifts to posterity, and…
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For weeks after the snow melts there are only damp dead leaves from last year’s bounty along Averill Road.  Then one day there are forget me nots, brilliant blue in the dull leaf litter, each with its golden center.  A whole cloud of them appears overnight in the annual magic of spring.  My mother loved…
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I met Judy in 1992 when I joined the Chai Tech Chavurah, of which she was a founding member.  I found Judy reserved, somewhat harder to get to know than the more outgoing members.  But over the years I found so much to love and admire in her.  Judy and Mel, and later just Judy,…
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This weekend we got the news we’ve been awaiting for eight months.  Baby Zev, Tamar’s first grandchild is home with his parents.  Zev was born in July, about two months early, and had been in the NICU since then with a series of challenges for his tiny digestive system.  But he’s free of tubes at…
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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…
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We are not hibernating, although I certainly understand the impulse.  With temperatures dropping below zero and not getting above 20 for several days the world is brittle and crunchy.  The deer leave tracks with sharp edges where their hooves break through the frozen crust of snow.  When there is sun, the hard snow gleams. Coming…
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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…
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My sister Tamar wrote that in the Hamlet of Amenia where we spent our summers there is a new florist in the store where Dube’s used to be. A wormhole of memory opens.  The Dubes were an older couple when I knew them, around our grandmother’s age.  They had a narrow, dark, dusty dry goods…
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