In bright moonlight the shadows of trees are sharp on the crusted snow – each branch, each twig. Winter compensates for its inconveniences with breathtaking beauty. Icicles threaten gutters, but they are alive with light when the sun is out. The fields shine so brightly we need sunglasses. Across the landscape there is the vivid…
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Ashley is not the only reason I haven’t written in so long, but she has made life here a little busier and a lot richer. Ashley Katherine Nanyonjo arrived here from Uganda on August 25. Seventeen years old, she’s a Rotary exchange student attending Cooperstown High School. Over the summer a friend of ours was…
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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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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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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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