Our corner of the Catskills peaked a week ago in a rush of sunshine that gave one final push to those leaves and blew them out in a blaze of glory. Last year a surplus of apples covered the ground like a billion ball bearings. Walking was a balancing act. This year no apples at all, but the mountains maintained a palette of colors that made my heart beat faster. I am headed for Los Angeles in a week, and by the time I leave, the trees will be bare; the color will be gone. Winter is unofficially here. The song birds have gone. Jays and chickadees have shown up. Everything quiets down. The peep of the chickadee is nice to hear, but the shrieks from the jays and the squawks from the crows only mean mischief. "Stand aside," they seem to say, "I got my thing to do." And then they do it and make enough damn noise to make sure we all know they did it. As for the locals they either made it through the winter, or they didn't. Winter kill happens. Count on it. My gargantuan sunflowers attest to this. One week ago they were ten feet tall -- an entire row of them -- with flowers so large they looked like they were trying to snag radio signals from outer space. Now they are bent low like haggard old ladies. They are not resting on their canes. They are in mourning.
A new species has come into our valley this past year. Thirty plus years ago we were the new species: two veterans of Hollywood and Broadway with income independent of the local economy. Our neighbors had been here longer than that: mountain people who long ago learned how to make it work.through hardscrabble labor and a determination not to let the weather whip them. I believe when we moved here there were maybe two second homes other than our own -- a cabin and a bunkhouse on acreage at the end of the valley that's been in the same family for a hundred years, and a girl scout camp that was turned into a stables. A former Miss Poland lived there for awhile where she often called us to come and get our dog. He'd long since sacrificed his testicles for civilization, but she had three females and didn't trust him. Aside from Miss Poland and the Fiesingers no one else comes to mind.
Since then the demographics have changed. My neighbors, a retired couple half a mile west, no longer operate as a B & B (save for hunting season) and complain that they left Brooklyn years ago to get away from these people, and now they've tracked them down here, these people being the folks half a mile east in their early thirties, recent migrants from Brooklyn, who now run their own place for folks who seem to come primarily from Brooklyn, hip and lively and stylish. They made this month's Vogue which is not a problem for me since I can use some hip and lively from time to time, and a little style never hurts. If I'm not mistaken, I am now the oldest person in this valley; but, if I am mistaken, I'm close. I belong here. I may not have decades ago but I do now. I've transited from curious species to neighbor to local. A neighbor meant people knew where I was if they needed me. A local is someone who sits on the porch with another local and watches the changes pass by. They're still sitting there the next time you pass by as well. Sometimes you'll stop, and when you do you'll find out who butchered the sheep back then and that he shot himself when he became too weak to work, something common to farmers up here when they no longer felt useful. That sort of thing. Stories to tell. Lore. And now I am the repository of some of it, one of the voices that passes it on.
