Here’s that Rain You Ordered
May 25th, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming, Local events
Just wind, rain and cold for this holiday weekend
Everybody in our part of Upstate New York has been complaining about how dry it’s been this spring. Where’s the rain? Well, you couldn’t have written a wetter, colder, drearier script for this Memorial Day weekend.
As luck would have it, this is the weekend my wife and daughter chose to visit. They haven’t moved up permanently from D.C. yet. So they braved traffic and drove 400 miles with a carload of household goods. After a taste of what it can be like here without heat or furniture (except for my overstuffed armchair), my wife was ready to hit the road home again.
See, when the previous owners moved out at the end of April, they asked if they could take their beloved wood stove with them. We said sure, because my wife wanted to upgrade to a more efficient stove and lay tiles behind and under where the stove is supposed to sit. The only other source of heat is an oil furnace in the basement. But there’s no duct work in the house. The furnace just blows hot air into the basement to prevent the pipes from freezing in the event there’s nobody here to stoke the wood stove.
The only furniture in the house is the aforementioned armchair and a small dining set with chairs. That’s because being a guy, I can live without frills like furniture. Those things won’t be moving until later this summer.
Besides feeding the sheep and chickens, which takes maybe 10 minutes, there’s not a whole lot to do in this bleak landscape except sleep late under a thick comforter or search out local activities like the “dinner and a movie” at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greenwich last night.
It’s amazing to me that more people don’t take advantage of events like this. But perhaps it shouldn’t be. In all the years we lived in D.C., we were real laggards when it came to venturing out of the house. Except when friends and relatives visited. Then we were only too happy to show them around town.
Last night’s dinner, where we got to meet some of the locals, consisted of spaghetti and meat sauce with a side of salad. The movie: Lincoln, rented from a video shop up the street. The theme is relevant for these parts because Upstate New York was a hotbed of abolitionism around the time of the Civil War. Many of the residents here were ardent participants in the Underground Railroad, hiding escaped slaves from the authorities.
One of the organizers of the event works at the Greenwich library where an entire archival section is devoted to the slave issue. Upcoming is a commemoration weekend featuring a tour of homes that were used as slave safe houses. An Abe Lincoln reenactor will lead the festivities.
Turns out my wife and daughter won’t be driving home. Instead, we’ll have breakfast at the diner downtown, then stop at the hardware store for paint and supplies and start re-painting the interior of the house. The previous owner was a builder, but many things about this house were never quite finished nor done up to my wife’s exacting standards. So that will keep us busy until the matinee of Alice in Wonderland at the high school, to be followed by the local fire department’s annual barbecue chicken dinner. Sunday promises to be pretty busy as well. And of course there’s the town parade on Monday morning marking Memorial Day.
Before you know it, the sun will be shining again.
P.S. Don’t tell my wife the weekend forecast for D.C.: sunny and pleasant.
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