O how things have changed. A Friday eve like this, anytime in my life more than 20 years ago, I would not have been rushing home at 6:30 or 7pm to catch the last hour of light in my backyard, I would’ve been looking for an outdoor cafe for my first beer. Tonight, though my heathen impulses were simmering and saying to me since 2 pm or so to cut short the workday and get out to enjoy the sun, I resisted and kept going with the phone calls, the emails, the scanning, and sending out information that might do me some good next week. Conferring with clients underway, appealing to would-be clients, checking on and confirming showings on my listings, all that stuff Realtors must do to keep the plates spinning all at once.
I will say the air conditioning in the office is and was good motivation as well. And there was a sense that, with the Jazz Festival starting tomorrow in town here, and with my favorite local musicians of the moment (Four Down The Band) coming in Saturday night the 30th to play at Bailey’s Cafe, I knew I should postpone the frivolity till those events were in front of me. And even though my extended family was all up in The Hague enjoying Lake George on this glorious early summer day, I needed to fill the role of the diligent dad, tied to his task despite his inner instincts to goof off. But I got done what I needed to do, made my stops on the way home to drop off updated brochures and to see certain clients… then I cruised the rest of the way home toot sweet…
As I approach home, The sun is just absolutely blanketing the plateau with late afternoon light. One assiduous neighbor is astride his John Deere, which I duly note is worth more than my trusty ’06 Chevy HHR at this stage in its life, facing 200,000 miles soon, like tomorrow. I am not one of those Realtors that drives a Lexus or a Beemer, and probably never will be…though Miles is pushing me to get a vintage Mercedes, not for style points but for sheer quality, as he sees it. (I’m more inclined to a newer Chevy, but that is next month’s issue.) I laugh and tell him that if he hadn’t come along 20 years ago and then gone to private school for the last eight, I would’ve had the vintage Mercedes when it was new, maybe. But he doesn’t believe that and neither do I. Just jiving. But once I park the car and exit, I think no longer about how old it is or how many miles it has. It got me back here.
Much as I love having family, I must say it’s nice to come home to an empty house,
although only once in a while. Without a sitdown dinner routine, I can scarf up a piece
of cold chicken they thoughtfully left for me, and steam up a bowl of leftover goulash with gluten-free elbows, peas, organic beef, and tomatoes. Perfect. Then, for the exercise I’ve been craving all day, I change quickly into jeans (despite the heat, I’ll explain) and a dark tee, fresh socks and grungy sneaks. I apply the tea tree oil which works so well in the northeast jungle to repel the myriad insects of late June, particularly the mosquitoes. I spread some birdseed out by the feeders for tomorrow’s morning doves and finches, sparrows and swoopers (the bluebirds and swallows and such). Feed the birds and the universe will feed you, I have come to believe. Simplistic, I know,
but the principle works.
I grab my staff and a cold plastic hand-grip bottle of water and set out for my Thoreau-stroll, as I dub it. Our two-acre patch does not take long to walk, unless you’re pushing the manual mowers we still use, (how primitive) but the back patch of birch and scotch pines leads to a deeper and denser set of woods, a steep hillside that is now forever wild, as part of our HOA. When we first moved out here, there was almost no path through the summertime overgrowth of ferns and prickly ground cover– which means you either wear jeans or get sliced up around the ankles and calves. The deer would cut a narrow line through the foliage, slanting down the hill, but otherwise it was all bushwhacking to get down to the stream, whose name I will not mention for this piece, though I have sung its praises before. The Mohawk used its name to describe the
region as a whole, which is how important it was to them.
Now, however, there is evidence of other people paying close attention to this little-used waterfront acreage, as I will describe in a moment. Let me first say that, after 8 years of intermittent hiking, either me alone or with kids or wife in various combinations, we’ve only run into other people down in back maybe two or three times. A stray fisherman once or twice, and then another guy in the neighborhood, just once, walking with his two daughters. So we always felt protective of the thousand-plus feet of creekfront and its Adirondack purity…bringing bags with us to drag out whatever tin cans, old bottles, styrofoam worm containers, occasional plastic or cellophane we would find here and there, mostly close to the waterline. (Most fishermen around here are not as cool as Field & Stream would make it seem.)
Now I take my thirty-minute loop of a hike– across the top of the ridge, down the zigzag paths along the property’s westernmost creek-bed ravine, through the pile duff to the high stream-side, walking and paying homage to the clear flowing liquid which defines our area, I still hope, as a healthy and gorgeous area, then through the mucky swamps formed by the spring-fed tributaries in this fertile valley, and then striding up the rise via faint the faint deer-path past the 200-yr old hemlock and its cousin white pine that anchor this hillside, for the final hundred-foot climb, which gets me every time, in a good way, like 10 stories worth of stairs, just as I finish, breaking a sweat, and entering back into the sunshine of the grassy clearing behind our house. I sit in my low blue chair and soak up the last of the solar rays before they dip below the treeline. I sip my clear well-water (no chlorine), do my deep cleansing breaths now that I am done panting, and blow away the residue of the day.
This is my Happy Hour, and I haven’t seen another soul during the whole time, as gladly lonesome as Thoreau. Now I’m ready to return to the house, and write this.
Tomorrow and Sunday there will be more work in the mornings, but music in the afternoons and evenings, and full conviviality will be found. But tonight, this fortuitous Friday, I’ve found a modicum of natural peace and taken in the sound of the stream as I paced past. This is what I needed, more than a glass…of beer or spirits or wine.
I’ll talk more of how the woods have been altered, somewhat for the better, in my next post after I report on the all the Saratoga music… here during the last weekend of June…
Ciao for now,
Wayne