October 2015

Crickets: In my phone, I used to be able to choose the sound of crickets chirping for the rare occasion when I needed to set an alarm. Sometime along the way a programme update hid the cricket option.

Last week, the crickets were still calling outside the front door of our house in Upstate New York. Autumn was dealing out brilliant colour at the tree canopy level, but at the grasshopper level it was still summer.

This morning all that changed as we woke to frost and minus 4 C. Later in the morning on our way to Saratoga Springs, light flurries of snow along with rapidly swirling leaves flew at the windscreen.

We’ve been here two weeks already, cleaning and tidying up, indoors and out. The forsythia, which threatens to take over the whole garden and maybe, the village, has succumbed to my shiny new mattock, and is now contained for a while.

The Village: There has been a major disruption to hamlet life. The Post Office has closed down and there is little sign of hope that it will be re-opened.

It used to be housed over the road from us, in the former railway station. Now there is silence, no longer the trucks making deliveries throughout the day, no cars scrunching the stones on the driveway as people come to deliver and pick up mail. The railway station appears abandoned.

The building did not meet the work health and safety standards of the US Post Office, and the landlord was not available or prepared, I don’t know which, to fix it up. Some people say that the PO is looking for another suitable building, others say if that were the case, the PO would have put in a mobile one until that happened.

There are two other shops in the hamlet, one a small general store with the best butcher in the state of New York, famous for his sausages, the other an antique store. Most days, it seems , there are fewer cars in the street than used to be. This is not good. The PO was part of the social glue; farmers, trades people, town folk met up with each other. Some left their finished-with books, magazines, for others to take home and enjoy. A neighbour used to keep a range of books for children to read, or have read to them. That had already stopped after the previous postmaster retired. He, Rosie, was the newspaper of the hamlet, sharing useful information and updates of people unwell, people out of town for a while, people coming back for the holidays. But always discreet & never gossiping. When we bought our house, he bought a school globe for the counter, to show curious customers how we came from the ends of the earth. We met people who had lived in our house. It felt like we were connected.

The Walks: The walks continue to be my constant joy as well as necessary exercise. The corn fields I pass, I have now seen in each season, the hills on the horizon now changing colours, appearing as a patchwork, autumn golds, reds, greens, and mauves, underneath a blue sky with thick fluffy clouds. The walks are never boring, a pheasant couple skedaddle along the corn rows when they see me; the crows plotting; no deer as yet in the day time, but what is this? A spinal column with tiny scapula attached, down here alongside the road? One of last summer’s juveniles that didn’t see the car coming? I go to pick it up, Michael is into drawing and also studying forensic anthropology, it might make a nice gift for him. I pick it up with gloved fingers, though it is already picked clean by the crows, but the skeletal remains disintegrate and fall softly back to the earth.

Another walk takes me past the pig farm, and the chicken farm, where in summer, they are protected by beautiful white dogs.

That walk also goes past a dairy farm. Photographs cannot convey the rich scent of manure, which seems to be recycled onto the cornfields.

This place moves me, not more or better than the beautiful places in Australia, but in a different way, that maybe hooks memories and memories of feelings of my childhood, growing up in England, often in rural or semi rural places. Smells, sounds, sights seem to reach out to something deep within me that would otherwise lie dormant.

 I open my new collection from Mary Oliver. Her poem “ Nothing is too small not to be wondered about” ends with

“But certainly it doesn’t mean he hasn’t been an excellent cricket all his life”

I go to set the alarm on my phone; I find the crickets in a different folder. The world is right for now.