The most beautiful thing about the ski lift is that every single time I survive it, I am filled with renewed zest for life. Everything from here on out is gravy. I breathe a new air. I also yell “Woooooooo,” which is embarrassing, but it has to be done.
Coming back home was a rough landing. It took me a few tries to get it right. The ground around here is rocky and hard, and famously tough to put down roots in. Home is beloved, home is many things, but it isn’t comfortable.
The Catskills mark the northern edge of Appalachia, a region with a 37 percent higher mortality rate for “diseases of despair”—suicide, alcohol and drug overdose—than the rest of the country.
If the New York Times can send reporters to Antarctica they can damn well send one to Margaretville to cover watershed meetings every once in awhile.
The seed catalogs have arrived. It is time for a bout of self-examination: Are we up to this?
Two senseless accidents claimed the lives of local men in the last several weeks. There’s no one to blame, no one to rage at. Unless you count the local paper, which is taking ferocious heat all over town for publishing a Facebook post about one of the deaths on Friday morning, just a couple of hours after it happened, before all family members could be informed.
I think we can all agree that the real joy of Christmas is spending time with the important people in your life. People like Jan the Xbox tech support specialist. Jan and I got a lot of quality time in this Christmas.
Despair isn’t new, and neither are the cold, and the dark, and the depredations of the ruthless during lean times. We defy these things at solstice. We talk about “Christmas cheer,” but this thing we do with the burnt-out stub of the dying year is older than Christmas, and it has always been a light in a dark place.
The experience of tearing away decades of bad design choices is familiar to anyone who owns and old house. Some day, no doubt, a future homeowner will scratch their heads at our renovations. What can I say? 2017 was a weird time.
There’s a campaign to urge second-home owners to register Upstate in the hopes of increasing Democratic turnout. These are dark times, and there is much at stake nationally. But local politics are no less important. And it is ludicrous to suppose that the only way to build a solid platform for better representation in NY-19 is to import voters from more left-leaning areas to drown out the voices of full-time residents.