Our beautiful cabin in the woods is in Columbia County near the hamlet of Elizaville, whose claim to fame is a 50’s style diner plunked on a grassy knoll just above a pond at the edge of a feed corn field, the only place of business anywhere in sight for several miles in all directions. We have just come from a very late lunch at the diner, not having eaten breakfast until after 10am. The kids are upstream at the swimming hole in the Roeliff Jansen Kill that flows along the back edge of this property. My husband is working on the puzzle we started a couple of days ago and I am blogging and dozing alternately. Feeling so much better today with using the antihistamines. I slept for 8 hours last night.
In between meals we drove to the Bard College campus for a tour around its lovely green lawns and gardens and campus buildings, hidden among tall leafy, ivy wrapped trees. Twelve years ago our son completed his MFA after enrolling in their intense programme taking up two to three summer months for three summers running. What a treat to finally see this glorious place that confirmed in my son’s mind New York State was where he wanted to live. We also toured the on campus Hessel Museum and Art Gallery where we were treated to an exhibition of art dealer and abstract artist Dorothy Parsons, long known more as an art dealer….she was instrumental in helping artists such as Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin become more well known. Although she did not paint her own first abstract painting until the age of 47, she was one of the first female artists to receive acclaim in that genre of work. It was so much fun to see her works from the 1950’s up until the 1970’s. She passed away in 1982, I believe. The exhibition is curated by one of my son’s Bard mentors…the one who first contacted him with an invitation to apply, Amy Sillman. We particularly enjoyed watching two short filmed presentations about Dorothy Parsons put together from old black and white tv interviews where we were able to see and listen to Dorothy Parsons herself. She was known during her lifetime as more of a dealer than an artist in her own right.
We enjoyed driving along today on several of the many rural roads in this area. Intersections to access most of them from the slightly wider connectors like 9G, are nearly as hidden from view as the main rural roads themselves due to the long expanses of thick forest along the main corridors. Once off 9G for example the vistas open up with feed corn fields and small well kept acreages owned often by wealthy New York City families who want to own a couple of horses and a cow during their summer holiday residencies there. Driving for so many miles through these trimmed, mowed and freshly painted houses, BMW’s and Corvettes and Harley Davidsons and huge new 3/4 ton trucks in the driveways, brings to our minds afresh the degenerate, scruffy looking rural areas around our own city, populated by real farmers who work so hard and don’t always have the time or financial resources to keep the home quarter residences and yards looking so pristine. Every property we have seen since leaving the city could be featured on a postcard. It looks most strange to us.
Tonight we will all pack up as much as possible to be ready to leave early in the morning. We will blast off in a reasonable enough time to break for breakfast part way back so our son can rest a bit before the last push back into city traffic. We have a 3pm deadline to get our daughter in law back for a meeting so we can’t dilly dally around here getting ready to leave. Just as well or it would be noon before we leave, haha. We have all been very relaxed here!
A laundry day will be next on our agenda back at the rental and then we will choose a couple of sightseeing destinations for mid week before a big Shabbat dinner with the other side of the family on Friday…the end of our second week in NYC. The time is flying by too quickly.
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