HARLEM VALLEY — For many, summer may be a break from academics, but local libraries have been working to promote reading outside of the classroom through a series of fun and hands-on programs. Beginning in July, the Amenia Free Library, the NorthEast-Millerton Library, the Pine Plains Free Library and the Millbrook Free Library hold their annual summer reading programs. This summer’s theme, in accordance with the New York State 2011 Summer Reading Program, is “One World Many Stories.” Children are encouraged to keep a book log of their summer reading and to come for a wide range of weekly activities at the local libraries. Each library has taken a slightly different approach toward the overarching goal of getting children to read, which appears to have been met across the board.In Amenia, each Friday at 10:30 a.m. brings something new and exciting. At the annual treasure hunt on Aug. 5, veteran participant and Amenia resident, Tegan Moeller, 10, described the joy of attending each summer.“I can’t wait for next Friday’s ice cream party,” she said. “You never want to miss the last two [sessions]. They’re the best!”The ice cream party on Aug. 12 will mark the culmination of a successful 2011 session in Amenia and will include a very special guest llama. As Tegan and her friend, Mira Salmons, 6, rummaged through their bag of collected treasures, she excitedly showed her father, John, the new book about the solar system that she chose for this week. Tegan explained that she picked this book because science is one of her favorite subjects.Standing by was Webutuck Central School first-grade teacher and treasure hunt organizer Heather Farr-Kilmer. She has been volunteering with the program for the last few summers and this year had the help of her daughter, Caroline, 11, and friend, Joe Butts, 12, with the hunt. Farr-Kilmer described the program as a good opportunity for her to meet some of her incoming students before the start of the new school year. While blowing bubbles (one of the found treasures) with her friend, Dayra Raoms, 8, Michelle Esquivel, 9, said that she particularly loved when Bee Bee the Clown came on July 8 to perform magic and tell stories. Previous activities at the Amenia library have included musical performances, sing-alongs, crafts and a show and tell, many of which have incorporated storytelling. The summer session at the Millbrook Free Library has experienced similar success, with every program filled to capacity and including a wait-list of eager participants. Highlights have been a Harry Potter night before the movie’s release and a Thomas the Tank Engine-themed day. The final upcoming summer activities, for children ages 4 and older, will be Lego events on Tuesday, Aug. 23, at 3:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Aug. 24, at 6:30 p.m. Registration is required.Rhiannon Leo, director of the NorthEast-Millerton Library, explained her library’s innovative approach to promoting summer reading through the exchange of tickets for books read. Children can use their tickets to enter a raffle of prizes, which Leo said has encouraged and motivated the young readers throughout the summer. The library had 82 children participate this summer, surpassing its goal of 75, and the various events throughout July and August have been filled to capacity. Beginning with the Summer Reader Kick Off Party on June 26, activities have included family game nights, a Hawaiian luau in honor of the American Girl Doll of the Year, Kanani, and knitting classes. The library has also offered reading help from certified elementary teacher, Sarah Bellora. While the focus of the local libraries’ summer reading programs has been largely on younger children, the Millerton library has also offered Read for the Green, a program that pays adolescents ages 12 to 18 $3 for each new book that they read and review on the library’s blog. According to Leo, this initiative has also been a big success in promoting summer reading for an older population. On Saturday Aug. 13, at 11 a.m., the NorthEast-Millerton Library will host an end-of-summer reading celebration that will include a performance of Bubble Trouble with Jeff Boyer, followed by ice cream and the summer reader prize announcements. The Pine Plains Free Library will hold its final two Summer Story Adventures, as part of the New York summer reading program, for children ages 4 to 8 on Saturdays, Aug. 13 and 20, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. In addition to in-house events, the library also has offered a summer online reading program, which provides reading recourses and recommendations and allows children to log their reading online. The summer reading programs aim to reinforce reading skills throughout the summer so children enter the new school year ready for success and with a passion for books.
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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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