WEST CORNWALL — Where have all the cats gone?To good homes. A sale on cats at the Little Guild animal shelter worked out better than anyone had hoped. At this time of year, shelters see an influx of strays rescued from the cold. Already at capacity, the Little Guild staff aimed to make room by participating for the first time in “$5 Felines,” a nationwide promotion by the Best Friends Animal Society. From Nov. 26 through Dec. 3, the usual $150 adoption donation was drastically reduced. Families and individuals still had to go through the same rigorous application process, though, aimed at assuring a good match for humans and felines.“I came in that first Saturday and there were about 20 people waiting in the lobby,” Little Guild Executive Director Denise Cohn said. The week that followed was a swirl of activity, as visitors continued to come in to meet the 25 cats waiting for homes. Staff and volunteers worked long hours to welcome visitors and wade through stacks of applications. The end result was, as Cohn described it, “spectacular!”As of early this week, 19 cats were adopted and many applications were under review. Many cats had numerous families wanting to adopt them, and there was a lot of back and forth as people considered other choices. The sale ended with a waiting list of qualified families interested in adopting. It looks like the shelter will place all 25 cats it had on the premises; and more cats may be brought in from another shelter.For Little Guild workers, it was not just about the numbers. While they love their felines and offer them a comfortable home at the shelter, they know the cats would be much happier with a family. But there are always those that are difficult to adopt out. Zora, for instance, was there for more than five years, after coming in feral and very shy. A woman who has lots of experience with such cats took her home. Wasabi, at the Little Guild for more than three years, found shelter life stressful and would lick off patches of fur. The condition was expected to go away once she was in a loving home. But it was a turn-off for would-be adopters.“Unfortunately, many people missed her sweet personality while looking at the cats, but not this week,” Cohn said. “She went to a perfect home.”Then there was Holly, a very shy, young cat waiting a year for a home. She was not going to find one easily by hiding every time visitors came into the cat room. But with demand high, one couple coaxed her out and fell in love.“Overall it was a huge success, far beyond what we were expecting and we couldn’t be happier,” Cohn said. “We are now able to take in at least as many as we adopted out and get them in from the cold, fed and treated for any medical conditions they may have.”So what brought so many people out?Lots of publicity (newspapers, radio and Facebook), Cohn said, and a moving YouTube video Guild members made with photos of people, mostly children, cuddling with the shelter cats. $5 Felines put the shelter on the radar for many. Zora went home with an Oxford, Conn., family. Many others traveled considerable distances not only to take advantage of the sale, but to see the shelter.“Many people were adopting because of the price, but almost all gave more than the $5 requested. Some paid the full $150. Everyone understood the amount of money we put in to each cat to meet their medical needs and insure each is altered and up to date on all vaccines.“Some were waiting for a ‘better time’ to bring home a cat but once they saw the publicity, and met the wonderful cats, decided this was the ‘best time.’ We made a video that was adorable and we had some people who watched it email us and say, “OK, I really want that cat — the one with the little boy in the video.” Definitely the awareness of the need to get these cats in to homes and bring others in from the cold, and the knowledge of who The Little Guild is and what we do, played a large role in the success.”Word is spreading. Calls are already coming in from friends of families who adopted a cat, wanting to know about remaining cats, as well as available dogs. Cohn said that one dad left his children with the cats while he went to check out the kennels. The family went home with a cat and a dog.For more information about the Little Guild, and a link to the video (click on the “cats” tab) go to www.littleguild.org.
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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 former partner, 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.”
This article has been changed to reflect that Hermans and Nelson were partners. A prior version states that they were married.
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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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