Another Bird in the Chimney

This morning we had another bird in one of the chimneys.  This time, I could not figure out how to let it out until I went outside and saw there was a clean-out within reach on the deck. It took a few minutes for the bird to realize it could fly free, so I was not sure right away that I had done the right thing.  But then, just when I was unprepared for it, out came the bird.  It flew away in a rising arc.  There is still a huge mess on the deck, since about a quart’s worth of wet ashes and soot fell out when I opened the clean-out.  It may not have been opened before. 

The owners of this house say they cleared a field by hand, found an old barn and had it dismantled, and built a large, casual family home to suit their tastes.  Many interior surfaces are wood, and a lot of that is antique.  There are two wood-burning stoves in the house, and an old-fashioned oven of the kind people would have used about 100 years ago.  

We are renters.

Because it is built around the frame of an old barn, the walls of this house enclose a huge interior space: four stories.  From the outside, it is barn-colored and large.  From within, a mix of old and new, all thoughtfully and carefully chosen like something my mother would have done.  I think my mother would have really liked this house, and I can hear her voice in my head, telling her friends at work the story I am about to relate to you.

Afternoons here are long. Someone finishes school early, and even if we have to go back to hand in the forgotten Math 8 Maintenance #3 Assignment (not because the backpack was disorganized but because it was hard to find because it was not printed on the special Math 8 yellow-colored paper), we are here, doing homework or eating snacks or staring at each other or turning the pages of The New York Times by early afternoon.  If we wait for the man who commutes by train to his job in The City, we might not eat dinner until 7:42 or 8:05 p.m.  During the day, the Red Barn House is filled with light by design (it’s the careful fenestration, don’t you know?). Once the sun goes down, it’s pretty damned dark.

One of us is reading Tom Sawyer for school, and enjoying it quite a bit.  It is an engaging read, and hard to interrupt for snacks or staring or The New York Times. I decided to give the new squeegee a try while the sun was shining and my work might yield visible results.  Again the dogs did a lot of watching, and so did the cat, but there were no pet escapes this day.

At some point we were sitting near the stove snacking and turning the pages of The New York Times, and there was the distinctive sound of a live bird in the stove pipe.   The curious adults of the house have already seen for themselves that birds have come down the stove pipe before, since there is a dead bird in a pan inside the stove right now.   But this was our first live bird-in-the-house experience.  I heard the bird scrambling in the stove pipe. I think I said aloud, “A bird just few down the chimney.” The cat came flying at the stove, but we had not yet determined how it was to be released. 

I found a little clean-out hatch, but before I opened it, I locked the pets in a bathroom.  I opened the hatch, and waited.  After about an hour, the pets were unhappy and vocal about it. I reasoned that the bird was not smart enough to come out the way I had provided for it to come out.  I got busy doing something else, and when I heard the thumps and the scrambling pets, it took me a second to realize what it was.

I summoned every bit of help I could get, locked the dogs in the bathroom again, and interrupted Tom Sawyer to get some help with the cat.  The cat is pretty fat, so he was not very hard to grab.  The bird had flown upstairs and was sitting, wild-eyed and panting, legs askew on the sill of a window which cannot be opened. We opened another window and using the screen as a tray and a vacuum cleaner attachment as a prod, offered the bird a chance at freedom.  The offer was accepted, and suddenly all the excitement was over.

The lease of this house came with a few unusual stipulations, including the requirement that we employ a specific housekeeper.  She is good-natured and pleasant and does a good job, so we are happy to pay for her services.  We would have been happy to hire her had we been asked, and I am still puzzling over why it was felt to be necessary to legally compel us to do so.  Another day I will write about this more, but for now I am still wondering about it.  The next day when I spoke to the housekeeper about the bird in the house, and she told me that she had two birds in the house this summer, both times they came down the other chimneys, the one that caught a bird today.

I think when I see the owners, I will mention this, because from the ground the tops of all three pipes appear to have features which should prevent entry by birds, and clearly those features are disabled or not working.  

Oh, Deer

The house we are renting has large windows, and the windows want washing, inside and out.  First I wasted a whole bottle of Windex and a whole roll of paper towels, having poked around in the closets looking for a proper squeegee, and finding none.  The dogs watched me going at the windows the whole time. I thought I was being interesting. It was the deer in the yard, though, that was the interesting part, and as I came in, out went Captain for a long, deer-chasing romp.

Later, I made for the closest hardware store I know of, in the near-ish town of Cross River. The hardware store makes keys, sells paint, and has the parts of your running toilet that will make it stop running. Like so many of the small hardware stores you find in strip-malls, it’s packed to the rafters with merchandise. I always find that you walk in and ask the guy behind the counter. Don’t bother looking for yourself. I was shown a few options, and picked a squeegee for which one must provide a handle. The clerk found a couple of possibilities for the pole, none of them perfect, but he did secure the pole to the squeegee with a screw, charging me for neither the pole nor the screw. Along the way, I got a bit of history (the upstairs of the store used to be the screening room of the old movie theater), and some predictions for snow this winter.

In Westchester County, deer (and black bear) can be hunted only by bow, and the season is from October 15^th to December 31^st. I have already met one man who has permission to hunt on this land.  The deer here are certainly plentiful, and a danger to motorists. I see them every morning when I walk the dogs to get the paper, all day when I look out the windows, every afternoon when I walk the dogs on the road, and every day when I am out driving.  There was a large doe killed recently on Cat Ridge Road, where I walk.  One of its hind legs was broken in the accident, and stuck out from its body at a disturbing angle. It happened on Friday night, and the carcass had been removed by Monday midday. Scavengers had only just started to make progress on it.

The deer here in Westchester seem well adapted to seeing people and cars and trucks, and give everything a good, long, dumb stare before walking or running away.  There is a group that I have seen grazing dully at the margins of the Taconic Thruway near Lagrangeville. The speed limit is 50 mph, but many people seem to take that as a polite suggestion, like flossing daily or changing your smoke-detector batteries twice a year. The one thing that seems to make deer try to leap high and run fast is my knuckleheaded dogs; they charge at deer, barking furiously in frustration, running as fast as they can with no plan for maneuvering over the stone walls that the deer hop over without much visible effort.  Maybe if deer made more noise I would respect them more.

My landlord informs me that he likes seeing the crows and ravens and vultures and eagles that come if the bow hunters leave the entrails after gutting a deer.  As a dog owner, the possibility of my dogs getting into rotting deer entrails is pretty scary, but it is not nearly as scary as the prospect of preventing any and all Vizsla escapes from October 15^th to December 31^st, from dawn to dusk.  I am pretty sure that Vizslas look as much like white-tail deer as any dog can.  

Safety Patrol

I try to get out for a walk every day.  There is an almost-three-mile loop from my front door on a country road with neither stripes nor shoulder.  The town speed limit is posted as 30 mph. This is loosely interpreted as whatever speed you will go.  Most cars seem to be aware of me and my leashed dogs, slow a bit (though never a lot), and give us room.  I have only had two scary encounters so far, the first happening during the first week of school.  It was a woman with a blond ponytail who drives a black BMW SUV and since she was on the phone she never did see me or my dogs. The second was this week, when the FedEx ground truck went by so fast Captain dove into the drainage ditch at the side of the road and cowered there, crouching.   

I do see other walkers, mostly women, sometimes with dogs and sometimes chatting and walking vigorously in pairs. There is one young woman who walks down the middle of the road, and who was not wearing shoes the first two times I saw her.  She has long, straight brown hair and bangs and large eyes that don’t look at you.  She wears clothes I can only describe as completely ordinary. But then she doesn’t have shoes on. With her is a dog that I would call a tan and white pit-bull mix. It wears no collar, and she carries no leash.  We saw them the very first time we went for a walk. The dog is out of control but friendly. The woman doesn’t really talk, not even about the dogs.  I gave her a nickname: Gandhi, pronounced “Candy.”

Two days ago, the dogs and I headed off to check the road-kill (which is another story completely), but found the road was blocked for repairs.  Yesterday, I passed the repair crew, and we exchanged smiles and nods. Cherry sneezed at the smell of the hot asphalt, and I got a chuckle out of that. But that day, we headed down the road past the stable with the intention of turning back at the half-way point.  I was thinking about the Haves and the Have-Nots on this road (which is also another story completely), when the vet pulled out onto the road next to me after a call to the stable.  He pulled up alongside of me and warned me, with concern in his voice, to look out for a pit-bull which is being walked loose and has been allowed to chase horses. “Don’t want it to be a problem for you.”

Friendly

If you take the Harlem Line on MetroNorth and get off at Purdy’s, there is a town up in Westchester County called North Salem. This is no real town in the typical sense of the word, but a town in the sense of a corner of a county. A map shows spots like Grant Corners and Peach Lake and Salem Center. When you drive around (and if you have anything to do at all you will be driving around), you see signs that say Waccabuc (which is fun to say silently to yourself) and Golden’s Bridge and Cross River. The signs are the official green road signs, so I presume they are intended to inform, but I find them very confusing.  The only way they make sense to me is to view them as labels, as if the section of the road requires a branding strategy, so drivers will never mistake it for another stretch of competing road.  Old Salem is not to be confused with South Salem, Katonah is not to be confused with Bedford Hills, and so on.
I think that places which can be reached by a commuter train are probably suburbs, even if there are dirt roads and tractors, which I consider to be two of the tell-tale signs of a rural area. I see more SUVs here than I do pick-up trucks, and the cyclists wear shiny spandex.
Having been here less than a week, I know no one here but the realtor who arranged for the rental, and the three administrators I spoke to in an effort to enroll my son in school. I have a P.O. Box, which I check every day and it is almost always empty. One day  I did have one piece of mail: it was from the U.S.P.S. informing me of the failure of the change-of-address I attempted from our prior address. It seems the temporary apartment in the city is a business, and only they can forward my mail. I also noticed the other day that the post office hours have changed to now include an hour’s closure for lunch, from 1:15 to 2:15. This lunch closure is perfectly timed to coincide with the end of school at 2:10, so that it is impossible to check your mail on the way to school: it must be checked after. 

The timing of the afternoon school pick-up always sends me into a panic, since it is a full fifty minutes before it ever occurs to me that I might need to go pick him up and eighty minutes before what I consider to be a reasonable time to end the school day. I usually emerge from my mid-afternoon stupor at 2:15, realizing I am already late. Soon, I should look into the yellow school bus thing, since it seems to be an option. Sometimes I follow them all the way in to school in my efforts to deliver the boy by 7:28 am. 
I am not the only mother that drives her child to school here, nor am I the only one who picks up after. A line forms at pick-up time, starting by 1:45. Few parents interact with each other at all in this line, and while I have been tempted to introduce myself to the driver of the next car in line, I have not done it yet.
Monday mid-day I took the dogs for a walk. We got a good long look at a huge turkey vulture pecking at a carcass in the road and spied quite a lot of chipmunks. It was a beautiful late summer day. We were passed by a few cars. For the first time since we’ve been here, I felt like it might be tolerable to be here for a few months. 
Within a quarter mile of our rental house, we passed a woman with a small dog on a leash. Her dog grew noisy and excited about my two, and I offered to come over and introduce them, since mine are “friendly.” “Friendly” is a password among dog-owners which I have come to understand to mean “my dog probably will not try to rip your dog’s head off, probably,” or “my dog will jump on you and leave muddy foot-prints on your jeans.” One of my “friendly” dogs has a history of being quite nasty to other dogs, and it has only been since she spent three days a week at doggie-day-care in New York City that I have re-assessed her ability to greet other dogs reliably. 
The dog we met was feisty and full of himself, which no one finds surprising in a small fluffy dog. My dogs were polite. His owner and I chatted briefly about dog temperaments. I introduced myself.
As it turned out, I was introducing myself to my landlord. 

No York, No York

Of course you walk or ride the subway in this city. Or you take a cab or a bus. People live far away and ride the train in to the city every day.   It is thrilling to step on a Metro North train on a platform in sleepy suburban Bedford or White Plains or Rye and step off in Grand Central Station in the heart of bustling mid-town Manhattan.  Even closer to that too-good-to-be-true feeling is taking a comfier, quieter, and more expensive Amtrak train from Rhinecliff to Penn Station, with a view of the Hudson almost the whole way.  Some activities, though, require that a person still own a car. Owning a car means that a person needs parking.

Because we live temporarily in mid-town Manhattan, we had a number of options for choosing a garage, since there are a number nearby. We chose a 24-hour garage, since those that do not carry this designation are not open on Sundays.  Based on the number of cars that magically appear on our block on the weekends, when I guess it is legal to park on the street, I have reason to think that there are people who use these Monday-Saturday garages, and move their cars Saturday night and then again before 8 am on Monday morning. After six weeks of living here I still do not understand the parking rules for the streets of Manhattan.  Whatever the details of the parking rules of Manhattan streets, they are neither easy to find out nor easy to follow.  Apartments, too, have rules like this, like 28-day lease cycles, or pet weight limits, or condo owners who can sell the unit out from under you, or co-op boards that can turn you down as a resident because they don’t like you.

Our car is monthly parker number 58. When the car is parked, it is sometimes spirited to a deep parking dimension, and notice of needing the car must be given the night before. Calling an hour in advance of needing one’s car is only sometimes considered enough notice, and I was told last Tuesday, when I called and said I need the car at 1 pm that I couldn’t have it. I then asked for 2 pm, which was granted after the fellow on the phone consulted with someone else. For this level of service, we pay $375 per month.

Our Irene

Sunday evening we made it home with equal parts of technology, stubbornness, and the kind of stupidity that is sometimes called courage.  The cat was soon sprawled on the table, having finally stopped meowing. The dogs were twitching in their sleep on the couch, dreaming of the lightning and thunder they heard that morning, or all the dogs they played with, or whatever things dogs dream of.

We had had weekend plans for a while, and went ahead, leaving a day’s more extra food for the cat and warning the dog kennel that our dogs might need to stay until Monday.  Even though cats are independent, I felt a little sad and worried about the cat, all alone in the apartment, and I did wonder about the consequences of the power going out, high winds, and flooding.  A few weeks ago, we had been invited to spend the weekend upstate with new friends. Now, the weekend had nearly arrived and (then) Hurricane Irene was approaching. The media presented scary scenarios involving 120 mph winds whipping through the tall buildings of Manhattan, flash-flooding in the streets and blocks of power outages. Upstate with new friends seemed like a better option than riding out the storm on our own in a tiny, temporary apartment.

Friday afternoon, after dropping the dogs at day care, we headed out around 3 p.m., but found gridlock within blocks of all the Manhattan escape routes. We let the GPS navigate and we made our way north, taking two hours to get out of the city and up onto a freeway.  Arriving after dark, we had a nice dinner and rushed to bed. 

Saturday was pretty nice weather-wise, although very humid, and our hosts provided pleasant and comfortable array of food and activities. Sunday morning, we slept in a bit, but woke to house-shaking thunder and lightning.  Soon we found the storm had been downgraded, and we put on our gung-ho caps and decided it would probably be okay to make our way back to the city.  Had we been paying attention, we would have also learned that people in Columbia County had been asked to stay off the roads.

We drove from Chatham, New York to Pine Plains, hoping to arrive in time for our usual Sunday riding lessons. It was raining really hard the whole way, but it was not windy, and the roads were mostly empty.  I think most people had more sense than we did. 

The further we went, the scarier it got.  We saw drainage ditches overflowing with fast-moving water, ponds that had doubled in size, roaring creeks and rivers, and standing and flowing water on roads. Within ten miles of our destination, we drove to a spot where the Taconic State Parkway had just been closed.  It was flooded on both sides with the scary brown water you never want to drive across.  The gung-ho caps were flung off, and we started arguing about how to proceed.  I am always very stubborn about turning around, but not turning around was not an option.  We turned around.  Then, we took the first safe-looking road we could find to get off the Taconic, and let the car’s GPS do the rest. The barn was damp and drippy but still had power.  I think they were somewhat surprised to see us.

After riding we visited our oldest son at Bard College, where classes were scheduled to start Monday.  While much of campus has no power, his dorm room was an exception as of yesterday.  There was still a lot of water everywhere, and some downed trees.  We tried to leave in time to make it to Manhattan without it being completely dark. The GPS had to re-route due to traffic information four times, and we made it to the city with only a few scary moments.  It was just getting dark, but our power was on.  The only casualty of the storm we saw in our building Sunday night was the elevator, which we already did not trust.  It was parked on the ground floor, with the mysterious letter “C” where a number should have appeared on the panel. The light was on in the elevator car, and the door was opening and closing, opening and closing. 

You Nork

Tomorrow, I am going on a road trip for a couple of days.   
Here is a list of some of the things in New York that made me happy in the past six weeks.



1. A dozen Pakistan Independence Day Parade floats silently lined up outside the apartment one Sunday morning
2. Finding a really good dentist
3. The old slightly frail guy sitting alone at hipster burger joint Black Shack on Lexington, drinking a shake and eating a burger while he read the New Yorker
4. The Whitney Museum, especially the fourth floor
5. The High Line, plus the bit of unrestored elevated railway that is at the end of the High Line and is both utterly unpromising (covered in weeds, crumbling of rust) and promising (as a future extension) 
6. Our doorman, Ramon
7. Our dog Cherry now pees on command and will even pee in the street sometimes
8. The Brooks Brothers we can walk to
9. Riding the subway or walking in Times Square in breeches and half-chaps
10. Wild Edibles on 3rd Ave between 35th and 36th
11. Summer Streets, when they close Park Avenue to traffic from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park three Saturday mornings in August
12. Traditional Lamb Tagine with couscous at Barbe, the Moroccan restaurant two blocks from here
13. Breakfast and the New York Times and the giant newspaper recycling bins at Grand Central Station
14. The dog run at Madison Square Park 
15. Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” at the Morgan Library 
16. Central air-conditioning
17. Climbing boulders in Central Park
18. Buying a decent banana for 30 cents from a sidewalk cart
19. Jay-walking