where there's no place like home

A new year, with a few somewhat warm and rainy days in Mid-Michigan. Obsidian Kitten is just back from a trip to NYC to see family and friends, but with each return back east I realize my roots here, in rural Michigan, are growing deeper and deeper.

The New York I knew and loved -- the City of the 1980s and 90s -- is long gone and my strolls through the once familiar streets are plagued with reminiscence and a sappy nostalgia: an old grimy haunt revamped into a sleek upscale bar and restaurant, a great thrift shop turned Pottery Barn, an artists' coop gallery turned into a cosmetics boutique, that kind of thing. I experience a pervasive sense of loss for things that will never be the way I remember them--perhaps never were the way I recall.

A friend reminds me that big cities change rapidly.

The country--rural areas like the one in which I live now--change more slowly. I don't miss the city-sound of sirens, cars honking, the constant diving and buzzing of helicopters, of planes flying in and out of three major airports, the non-stop rumble of 24-hour city traffic and people and trucks and cabs and commuters crushing in and out of the city one on top of the other. NY is truly a city that never sleeps.

Here in the country, some things sleep at night (our llamas and chickens, the geese and many other birds), while many others sleep during the day and leave their prints in the snow as evidence of their busy, yet virtually silent, nocturnal activities (the rabbits, the coyotes, the mice and owls and racoons and possum and deer, perhaps a stray cat or two). They root avidly through our compost pile and leave tracks in the barn. The only ones I ever hear are the coyotes, howling late in the evening, so plaintively as to raise the hair on your neck, and sometimes an owl. But it is quiet here, especially in the winter, blanketed as we are under a white down comforter of fluffy snow.

The chickens--the ten pullets that arrived in a little box in the mail last May--are now grown and laying 8 to 10 large brown eggs daily, depending on the temperature and their mood. We kept one rooster to provide them with some company, but featherless patches on some of their backs lend evidence of his own sexual proclivities, as he digs his spurs into them when he mounts them for his brief, utilitarian, and most unromantic of mating rituals. I notice that he too is missing some back and tail feathers now. Some of the girls must be fighting back in kind.

The snow has begun again and I expect we will see little else until March or April. The hens and the llamas will have to make do with processed commercial feed and hay until spring slowly coaxes things green from the ground again, after the season of mud and mush and thaw. But that is the way of things here, where the earth is not buried under concrete and asphalt.

Some days I do miss the city. I miss ordering Chinese food a 2 am or running to the corner store for milk in my pajamas, and I long to ride the subway instead of digging the truck out of the snow. But there are so many stars in the sky here, and the cries of the geese, and fresh eggs every morning. Flowers for the table are picked, not bought. I am learning to spin fleece from our llamas into yarn, and to knit; I've felted slippers and mittens after shearing time. Simple, quiet things. In light of these things, the loss of big city conveniences is a small price to pay.

Time moves so differently in this, my rural home. It ebbs and flows with the sun and the seasons, not with subways and cars and crowds. It moves with the migration of the bats from our barn, with the whooping cranes and the geese and the barn swallows. There is a timelessness in the maturation of the chicks into hens and the daily gathering of eggs, the growing and shearing of fleece, the planting and tending and harvesting of vegetables from the garden and fruit from the apple and pear trees, of canning and freezing and dehydrating and butchering for the winter ahead, and in the very slow coming of the green of spring.

Now that winter solstice has passed, the days have already begun to lengthen. Here, in the country, where we must go out daily and tend to the animals, we notice these minute lengthenings of time, the phases of the moon, the tiny shifts in temperature and humidity, the varying amount of moisture in the air and on the ground. Time is both much larger, and much, much smaller. More circular, and more eternal. And here, in this eternity and circularity, there is solitude, and, in the solitude, true serenity.

On the Waterfront

Last year, Obsidian Kitten moved from a very urban area (Hoboken, which is a mile-square town just across the Hudson River from Manhattan) to a relatively rural one.

There is now talk amongst the village elders of building an industrial park on a large tract of farmland near the highway interchange. This plan has struck a surprisingly raw nerve with me.

I don't really think of myself as a political person. I am glad that there are people who are.

Mostly I'm just opinionated and kind of irritable. But I'm really grateful that there are people who care enough to do things about things -- you know, circulate petitions, organize marches, call senators, make signs. (I can sign and march and send email.)

And I vote. That's something easy enough for a relatively unmotivated person like myself to do. In my opinion, if you don't vote, you don't get to complain, at least not to me. So please vote. Then we can debate.

If you are a person who believes your vote doesn't count, please read the following. It is my story about voting.

This story concerns Hoboken's riverfront development and
the public referendums that ultimately shaped it into something
beautiful: a reasonable combination of commercial & residential
low-rise property designed with Hoboken's small scale in mind,
public access to the Hudson River the entire length of town, with
great public parks and even a commuter ferry slip.

Had the Hoboken Mayor and City Council originally had their way,
high-rises would've blocked the town off from the river with big
commerical construction that lacked proper permits or adequate
infrastructure. (I wonder if those folks paying $500,000 for condos
in Hoboken now would fork that over for rooms with no views and
no river access?) [And no, that's NOT an extra zero in there LOL]

Anyway, I wrote this last fall when friends were getting
discouraged about the upcoming elections. It's just my opinion,
based on my personal experience.

Bigger is not always better, but sometimes it's hard to put a price
tag on quality over quantity.

Once you smack a high-rise on your riverbank, or pave over your farmland, you can't get it back. Ever.

------------------------------------------
Just One Voice
Sept. 2004

I moved to Hoboken, NJ when I was 21 and called it my
hometown-of-choice for 14 years. This little Mile-Square City,
home to 30,000+ people, has a gorgeous mile-long stretch of
waterfront facing the west side of Manhattan. (Anyone seen "On the Waterfront"? It was filmed in Hoboken. *proud grin*)

Once the shipping industry closed its ports in the 1960s, the
Hoboken Waterfront (and Hoboken itself) fell into disrepair. The
1980s met an influx of artists looking for studios and inexpensive
housing, and these were soon followed by Yuppies and
gentrification (for both better and for worse).

Anyway, city officials were delighted with the 80s economic boom
and decided to develop the abandoned waterfront property.
Despite a ban on new construction of buildings over six stories,
they came up with a plan for several huge riverfront towers--office
buildings, luxury housing and the like. One particularly corrupt
builder, with ties to the mayor (who had ties to--well, that's another
story), was slated to begin the immense project. Permits were handed round with no due process and work was slated to begin.

A few citizens began asking questions. Why not have public parks on the waterfront? Is there infrastructure to support these enormous buildings? Do they meet building codes? There should be public access to the river, they argued. Moreover, city residents should have some say in what happens to the--to THEIR--waterfront.

The mayor and city council turned a deaf ear. So--to the shock and
horror of the city government--the Hobokenites called for a public
referendum.

I should mention here that Hoboken is a city where it was tradition
for dead voters to turn in ballots, for people to vote twice (or more),
and for city employees to show up at the polls under duress, fearful
of losing their jobs. Yet the first public referendum was won by the
"Coalition for a Better Waterfront" (CBW) by a mere handful of
votes (I believe by a margin of 5 or 6 votes). City officials called for
a recount, of course, but the results were the same. The city
stubbornly pushed forward and took the CBW to court, contesting
their votes.

With the help of several local lawyers working for the CBW pro
bono, the CBW won the referendum in the end and the mayor's
project was blocked. Two more public referendums eventually
were called in relation to the waterfront project, and each was won
by the people (over the city government), by narrow margins. In the
end, the public had a big say in development of Hoboken's
waterfront.

A decade later, Hoboken's riverfront incorporates lowrise mixed-
use buildings that incorporate affordable housing. There
is public access to the waterfront the entire length of Hoboken (and
to adjacent towns as well. There are several public parks,
ballfields, a bike path, a skateboard park, an outdoor ampitheater,
and a ferry slip.

I might also mention that this same waterfront property (post 9/11)
has attracted an international publishing company, financial firms,
and others, plus some pretty swanky riverfront restaurants--but all
in buildings **in keeping with Hoboken's personality and small-
town scale.**

So, I know from experience that a mere 2 or 3 votes matter. A lot. I
voted in those elections. If I hadn't? Well...my vote counted.

Love in a ballot box,
OK

everybody's looking for something

Obsidian Kitten has just returned from a journey to her southern homeland and a reunion with friends and faces of the past.

The Georgia coast is still hot and humid, "sweet tea" is still never Snapple, crabs and shrimp still come off the boat (not out of a freezer), and voices remain, as always, soft, caressing, and familiar.

I travelled with some baggage, and left much of it there.

Returning home, I think of my 87-year-old grandmother, who is not from Georgia, but from Pennsylvania Dutch country. Her eldest son (and my favorite uncle) died last year, as did my grandfather (and her husband of 60+ years). She lives alone in the house my father grew up in, tending her tomatoes and roses and her enormous grape arbor. She is lonely now, and so much thinner than I remember.

"All my friends are dead," she says, her perfectly white hair still always perfectly set.

This is not remorse, or self-pity. It is a statement of plain fact.

She had been in a sewing circle with the same group of friends for over six decades. These women have all passed away. Her brothers. Parents. The neighbors she knew. The customers in the grocery store her family ran for more than thirty years on Main Street. The women she traded recipes with at church picnics. All gone now.

My grandmother remembers all of their names, and many of their children's names (although she would not recognize the grown children now, with the children and grandchildren of their own). And she can tell stories about many of them, who talked funny, who practiced pow-wow, who was in a tragic accident, who moved to Florida, who had their hip replaced, who lost their husband in the war. She remembers everything, and is writing it all down.

But the people are all gone. Her friends really are all dead now.

Most--though not all--of my friends are still living. And many of us were kissed by the sweet, salty southern ocean breeze last weekend.

I am very blessed in this.

--OK