PINE PLAINS — Most people have tried square dancing at least once in their lives, usually during their elementary school years. However, square dancing is not just an activity for children. At the Seymour Smith Intermediate Learning Center on Academy Street in Pine Plains square dancing is a popular pastime for adults. The Tri-Mountain Western Square Dance Club has been gathering at the school for dances and classes longer than most members can remember. Every Tuesday night anyone can attend for square dancing classes, and then the first and third Friday of every month the club has dances where participants can test their skills. The dances are from 7:30 to 10 p.m., and all club members bring refreshments. One can either pay to become a member of the Tri-Mountain Western Square Dance club or they can pay a fee per dance, usually around $5, which pays the dance caller and for refreshments. “It’s the most inexpensive thing you can do,“ said Nancy Finkle, who has been square dancing with her husband, Gary Finkle, since 1976. The couple of 55 years is from Red Hook, and has square danced in Hawaii, Bermuda and aboard cruise ships in the past. “This is western style square dancing,” said Nancy. “The old-time dance, what they call the eastern style, you didn’t really have to go to lessons for because you started with one couple and then the next couple did the same thing, so by the time you got to the fourth couple you knew what you were doing. Here everyone kind of moves at the same time so you have to go to a year of classes [to learn the steps].”Nancy said the club usually has two or three squares at their dances. In square dancing there are eight people per square and each person has a partner. The caller is the person who announces the choreography and has a microphone to announce which moves to do in synch with the music. Internationally, square dance calling is always in English. During the dance dancers may switch partners and squares as they go along, however by the end of the dance one almost always ends up at their original square with their original partner. “The funny thing I’ve been finding out after all these years is that there are a lot of square dancers and callers that either are or were involved in teaching math,” said Sandy Corey, caller and teacher for the Tri-Mountain Western Square Dance Club. “They teach mostly high school math because of the symmetry of the square, which is what happens on one half of the square and then it happens on the other half. That’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to be a high school math teacher.”Corey is from Hopewell Junction and has been calling for square dances for 27 years; she started in 1985. “My parents started to square dance the year before I did. I went with my husband at the time as a thing to do to help our marriage,” said Corey. It didn’t help her relationship and she stopped taking lessons, but her parents continued, said Corey.“I went back the following year on my own and I loved it; I thought it was great,” said Corey. “About six years later callers in the area were getting older and many were moving south to the warm weather. Plus, there were not any new callers coming up since everyone was getting older. A local caller decided to have a class to teach some of us who were interested how to call.”From that group there is only one other caller who is still calling today, said Corey. It’s no secret to the members of Tri-Mountain Western Square dancers that the club is struggling to bring in new members.“It’s a dying thing. We used to have a good 15 squares years ago,” said Ethel Anderson from Hyde Park, who has been square dancing for 35 years.The majority of the club members are senior citizens who have been members for many years. None of them are from Pine Plains.Gary said he remembers when square dancing was extremely popular there would be 35 squares and the caller had to stand on an 8-foot ladder so he could see everyone and make sure they made it back to their original squares. “I hate to think it’s a dying thing,” said Corey. “What I think is the younger people are too busy. Either they are married; they are living up here and maybe working in the city; or they are just too tired. I think it’s also not really known that square dancing is out there. People think, ‘Well, I did that in high school.’ It has some of that negative connotation. But then there are some who liked it in high school and had so much fun and wish they could do that again. And then some people have never heard of it.”All of the club members said they look forward to their gatherings. “It’s a lot of fun, it’s good energy, good weight reduction and good exercise,” said Nancy.At the dances both the men and women dress up in costume. The women wear long skirts called prairie skirts and men usually try and match the color of their partner. Nancy says the club has tons of costumes from past members and she lays them out if people want to wear them at the dances. It’s a sight to see the members dressed up in their costumes, with bright smiles as they dance around the room, but joining in is even more fun. The Tri-Mountain Western Squares encourages anyone who stops by to try it out. “It’s just fun, it’s not hard and it gets easier as you go along,” said Nancy.
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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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