Elisabeth Grace is a retired clinical social worker living in rural Columbia County with two cats, Molly and Silkie. She divides her time between birding, animal welfare, gardening and writing.
After the Rain
Over two days in early June, 2013, I watched my driveway flow downhill and join Albany Turnpike. Soon, a lumbering orange tractor would grind its way up and down the slope scraping displaced earth and stone from the ditches at each side, would divert the runnels of water from the plateau at the top into a gully which had become blocked with fallen branches, rocks and mud, and filled in the 18-inch- deep crevasses which had kept me from driving up to the house for several days.
Although a steep, hundred-yard-long dirt driveway predictably needs re-grading every few years, nothing like this had happened in the previous forty years-- at least until a couple of weeks prior to the two days I'm talking about. The same thing had occurred then, with the same rifts opening up on the driveway, the same tractor arriving early in the morning to patch it up, the same curiosity on my part about the size of the bill which would follow the tractor.
Not for the first time, I wondered about the sanity of a single, aging woman who chooses to live on a hill in rural Columbia County. This self-doubt usually occurs after the second or third ice-storm of a typical upstate New York winter, not in the first week of June. Sometimes such introspection has led me to explore alternative places to live, but the arrival of spring has always undermined my intentions. And as soon as the driveway began to dry out that spring, reason gave way once again to reflections on why re-locating seemed like a really bad idea.
First, there's the house I've lived in for half my life. It's small, easy to warm up and cool down. It has a basement, as cluttered as most of its kind, but all the living space is on one floor. Facing west, the view from the study and living room is now hemmed in by trees twice the size they were when we moved in, but winter sunsets still astound my eyes. The yard is expansive and green in summer, white in winter, and has been on the cross-country route of red and gray foxes, fat groundhogs, dapper skunks and once, a lumbering porcupine, as well as countless species of birds. Deer, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks are residents, the former making themselves completely at home at the bird-feeders every winter, and munching on day-lilies in spring.
Neighboring houses are invisible in summer, but close enough to provide a sense of security. At just over a mile from the hamlet, my house is not cut off from some of the necessities of life: a post office, a country store and a restaurant. The hamlet used to boast a gas station, too, whose proprietor gave me credit for gas (I had forgotten my purse) the first time he met me, after asking me if I owned a horse and being assured that I did not. It did not take me long to understand the implications of that sly joke. On a later occasion, he gave me a dime when he learned that I frequently drove home alone from work after dark. If I ever ran into trouble on the road, Tom said, I was to call him and he would come and get me. My affectionate memories of him are tinged with amusement; one time I arrived home to find him, and his night-gowned wife, on the road at the foot of our property. They were peering up the hill to the place they had last seen one of their pigs which had made a quick exit from their pick-up, intent on running “all the way home” like the last little pig in the nursery rhyme.
Kind Tom, perhaps the most interesting of our new friends in the hamlet, is long gone, but I can still number many who could be called on in an emergency, and that is a good feeling for anyone who lives alone.
My mind ranges beyond the house, its immediate environs and the hamlet, and lingers on trips to nearby Chatham and on the convenience of things being close together. On a Saturday afternoon drive to one of the village's two funeral homes to say goodbye to an old friend, I dropped off my recyclables at the transfer station, and then contributed some cash to the dad of a Little Leaguer collecting donations in mid-traffic when the lights turned red. On the way home, I took in three yard sales and spent a total of five dollars on a book, a “used-only-once” Hallowe'en tablecloth, a Wedgewood ash-tray (I don't smoke, but I have a small collection of Wedgewood) and another trifle whose identity I now can't recall, but which must have seemed cheap at the price. Multi-tasking trips save gas and are a perk of small town and country life. Different facets of one's life are integrated too when one lives in the country but travels for work or pleasure: one friend carries a shovel in the back of her car so that she can lift road-kill to the side of the highway when she's on the way to her art class, and it was not unknown for me to drive to my Albany office with a sack of bird-seed or a bale of straw in my trunk.
Before the trees grew so tall, we not only had a more expansive view of sunset skies, but could track the seasonal journeys of the sun from south to north and back, and keep an eye on the cows on the farm across the valley. We used to buy raw milk at that farm-- ignoring, as did others, the obligatory notice that it was not for human consumption. The view is diminished, the cows are long gone and the family grown and scattered. Now the view in summer is a green rampart, sheltering my house, my animals and me. Wood Thrushes and Catbirds sing at dawn and dusk, rabbits trim the lawn, young Red-bellied Woodpeckers squabble at the feeding tray, and I can sit at the computer, or on my porch, at the end of the day, and take it all in.
It was, after all, only two days of heavy rain, not a hurricane or a tropical storm, that put my driveway inconveniently out of action for a few days that spring. Eventually it stopped raining, and the damage was repaired. That year, at least, there was no compelling reason to move, and there were and are many reasons not to.