WASSAIC — There’s no easy way to go through cancer treatment. But thanks to Wassaic resident Cindy Snow, those who have to undergo chemotherapy and other related treatments now have a little something to make that process easier, and it comes hand-delivered in a shoebox.Snow is the creator of Bonnie Boxes — individually decorated shoeboxes filled with thoughtful and much-needed items for the arduous journey cancer patients make while undergoing treatment. Besides being useful they show the patients that there are those in the world who care for them and their welfare, a sentiment that can be more important than any item donated — no matter how necessary.“The reaction I’m getting now verifies that they are definitely needed and appreciated,” said Snow. “One nurse said she felt special when handing them to her patients. Another nurse said she handed one to a gentleman going through cancer treatment and he burst into tears. He couldn’t believe a stranger made it who cared and understood.”Snow understands. She herself is a breast cancer survivor. She said she knows how exhausting chemotherapy can be, often lasting five to six hours a session. She also is aware of how lonely therapy can be for those who don’t have family or friends by their side.Snow said she was inspired by her friend Bonnie Rotker Acker and her son, Andrew, from Atlanta, Ga. Acker was going through cancer treatment when she and her son started delivering warm, cozy socks to other cancer patients in preparation of Andrew’s Bar Mitzvah. “A long story short is I tried to copy what she was doing,” Snow said. But it was difficult collecting enough socks. Snow eventually switched her project to Because We Care, and included more items in the boxes. It was well-received, but only by a small audience.Then Bonnie died on Feb. 1 of this year. Snow once again changed the project name, this time to Bonnie Boxes, and it “took off,” due in large part to a Facebook page put together by a mutual friend. Donations poured in, along with the shoeboxes in which those donations would ultimately be delivered. Now there are 10 states with 16 chapters that participate in the Bonnie Boxes project.“Oh my goodness,” said Snow. “I honestly think everybody can find comfort with it. Everybody feels so helpless when it comes to cancer and friends always ask, ‘What can I do?’ People want to help … and this is comforting.”“I watched my grandmother die of cancer and pretty much had always been there for her, and I watched others die of cancer, and it’s just touched so many people,” said Bonnie Boxes volunteer Lisa Dunlop. “Nothing really catches my interest that doesn’t involve my son, and this was it. And he was interested too. For a 9-year-old boy to say, ‘I want to do this,’ that kid has a big heart.”Dunlop said it’s easy to get lost in the spirit of kindness and generosity associated with the philosophy behind Bonnie Boxes. She said one woman she delivered a box to at a local hospital was overwhelmed with the gesture.“She was just amazed and shocked that someone would come in and bring that. She was so grateful,” Dunlop said. “Some people that go into chemotherapy don’t have any friends or family; they do it by themselves. I can’t imagine that but it must be the hardest thing in the world to go through.”The project has even made an impact on local Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts, who have been helping out by making Bonnie Boxes and collecting donations to fill them with. In Wassaic, the Scouts have been busy creating get well cards for the cancer patients to receive. “It’s amazing,” said Snow. The Bonnie Boxes come with a message inside: “This Bonnie Box of Love [is] for Cancer Warriors. May the treasures inside of this box offer you comfort, love and hope during this time. Made especially for you.”Donations are greatly appreciated. Snow said items to donate that go inside of every box include the following: Chap-stick, hand sanitizer, Dove unscented bars, snacks (crackers, almonds, ginger snaps), dark chocolate, small cans of ginger ale, notebooks, pens, two-year planners, warm and fuzzy socks and hats (hats must be made of baby-soft yarn) and grumbly bears.Grumbly bears, Snow explained, are furry pet toys of any sort that can be held up as a signal by patients feeling impatient in order to avoid getting into a spat with their loved ones.“Patients have told me, ‘Grumbly bears are saving my life!’,” Snow said. “That kind of cracks me up.”Currently Bonnie Boxes are delivered to a number of hospitals in the region: the Dyson Cancer Care Center in Poughkeepsie, Charlotte Hungerford Hospital in Torrington, Conn., and Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Conn. Soon they may be going to Sharon Hospital, if all goes well, Snow said. Bonnie Boxes will have a table at the United Presbyterian Church of Amenia’s book and bake sale on Saturday, March 29, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The church is located on Route 22, just north of the main traffic light in town. There will a variety of new items for sale, the proceeds of which will go toward buying goods to include in Bonnie Boxes. For more information call Snow at 845-877-9013 or check out Bonnie Boxes on Facebook. Donation for Bonnie Boxes may be dropped off at Snow’s residence at 3631 Route 22, Wassaic, 12592. There is a donation box located in her garage, which remains open to the public for such use.
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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