Our New York Vacation

I hadn't been home for six years, and the last time I was there I didn't take very many pictures. This time I really tried to capture the unique aspects of my home in the Adirondack Mountains. When I think of home, it's the land that I remember: The smell of the pines, the softness of the needles and leaves on the forest floor, the rain drumming its tune on my bedroom roof, the wild strawberries and flowers and ferns and mosses. I remember the humidity, the blueness of the rural New York sky, the mosquitoes and deer flies and black flies.  I remember the forest, the waterfalls, fishing and hiking and cross-country skiing and cutting our own Christmas tree. I remember Home.

The beautiful blue sky, complete with the moon, around 4 pm.Even now, I remember how I felt when I looked outside and saw this. It's gorgeous. 

I grew up in the town of Stony Creek (No, there was not an e in Stony. Strange.) 

Stony Creek is one of several creeks in my little town (We did not say "crick". That sounded like an insult, although occasionally native Stony Creekers were allowed to say that they'd been to "the crick", meaning they'd gone home.) Anyway, all the water in the Stony Creek area feeds into the Hudson River. When Stony Creek flooded after the spring runoff, a few brave kids would tube down it. I always thought they'd end up in the Hudson, but they got out before that. In any case, look at the rocks in the creek!  The water was low when we were there, so they really show up in this photo.  I believe it's so rocky there because the rocks were carried and smoothed by glaciers before being deposited. 

Below is a view of the (very low) Hudson River in Thurman, not far from home. I've only seen the river this low a few times. When I was young my Nana and I canoed this section of the river together.  

Across the road from my parents' driveway is this little stream. It flows out of our neighbor's pond. When I was young and Mr. Schulz owned the property, he was really vigilant about making sure his pond didn't stagnate--beavers tended to build dams in it, and he was constantly breaking up the dams, which meant the water was always flowing.  The new property owners don't do that, so this stream is much smaller than it was when I was a kid.   I would come here to write or think. So calm and soothing. 

There are lots of walls like this at home. Mr. Schulz built them all over his property. I love them now because I just don't see this on the High Plains. 

This was taken in my parents' field behind our house. 

This next photo shows my parents' driveway. The photo doesn't do the picture justice--the driveway is much steeper than it looks here. It was quite the job for my dad to keep it plowed and sanded in the winter. (We never had a plow, so he paid someone to plow it, but he sanded it by hand, hooking up a little trailer to our old dodge Trail Duster and later using the bed of his Ranger.  He got sand from the town sand pile and shoveled the sand into the trailer,  stopping several times on the driveway to unshovel it and spread it around.  Even then, there were some times that there was just too much ice and we couldn't make it up the driveway. Overall, those times were relatively rare--every winter my dad bought studded snow tires, which went on the front tires since we always had front wheel drive. Often we backed up the driveway, which my dad decided was more likely to work (all of the weight of the vehicle was on those studded tires) and safer; if we couldn't make it up, it was easier to drive back down than to slide down backward. Frankly, sliding down backward always scared me. I learned to back up too.

This was taken at the edge of the front yard. 

These next two photos of the boys playing in the rain were also taken in front of my parents' house. Basically, the house sits in the middle of a clearing that my parents cleared when they bought our land. It's not a development; it's the forest. Regular mowing, weed eating, and cutting trees was a big deal or that forest would've covered our lawn again quickly.