NORFOLK — Botelle Elementary School librarian Maryann Beauchene has a lot to celebrate this year. Chosen as the Norfolk School District’s 2012 Teacher of the Year, she has also gained recognition for her extensive work with therapy dogs, brightening the lives of both children and adults with her friendly poodles Remington and Buddy.During a morning session at the school Thursday, Jan. 19, Beauchene brought the father-and-son dog duo for a weekly appointment with special-needs students in the Shared Services Bridges I autism program. Remington, nicknamed Remi, has a curly white-and-gray coat. He is the father of Buddy, his darker gray counterpart. The friendly canines walked together calmly in unison, requiring a minimum of commands, and had no qualms about stepping on and off an elevator to get to the school library.Beauchene explained that therapy dogs help students develop social skills that are required for learning in other classes.“The job of the dogs is continuously changing,” Beauchene said. “Originally, as a librarian, I would have the students come to the library and read to the dogs. The dogs are non-judgmental, and they’re always paying attention to what the kids are doing. So we started off with reading therapy. Now the ideal thing to do with therapy dogs is to have a goal-oriented program.”Beauchene said students learn to calm down around Remi and Buddy and are offered the reward of free time with the dogs if they learn to control their behavior. Simple tasks such as hooking a leash to a dog’s collar can be difficult for autistic children, and the development of motor skills required to walk the dogs up and down the school hallways is considered a significant achievement.“We had one student who came in as a pre-kindergarten student. When the dogs walked in, he headed toward the door, screaming. Now that kid is in fifth grade and he’ll actually come up and touch the dogs,” she said. “For someone to go through life being that afraid of dogs and then being able to overcome that is a big deal. He may not love dogs, but at least he’s not having a panic attack.”Students who came to see Remi and Buddy last Thursday had a range of autism-related issues, most often exhibited through hyperactivity. Beauchene had them sit with the dogs for reading time, and even had one student lie down next to the dogs with a blanket for some quiet time.“It’s animal-assisted therapy,” she said. “And it doesn’t have to be dogs.”In fact, sitting in a cage across the room was Chicago, a golden tabby with an unmistakably mellow demeanor. A couple of the students found time to visit quietly with Chicago and read with him in a corner of the room. After visiting with the dogs, reading to them and walking them through the school hallways, the students had all visibly settled down, which Beauchene said would hopefully make it easier for them to learn in the academic classes.“Most of these kids can read,” Beauchene said. “And if they can read, think of how much of the world that opens up for them. Most kids with autism are not low-functioning, and when I look at them, sometimes we have little accomplishments, and I think to myself, ‘that opened up the world for them.’” Now in her 18th year as the Botelle librarian, Beauchene has chosen to retire at the end of this year, but she is finishing on a high note. She took home the Norfolk School District’s 2012 Teacher of the Year award for her years of work at the school and said she is looking forward to building a new career with animal therapy. She brings Remi and Buddy to visit adult residents at Community Residences Inc. on Willow Street and to another adult living facility in East Hartford. Beauchene said she believes special-needs students in Norfolk are in good hands at Botelle Elementary School and that her animal therapy with Remi and Buddy has served to complement an already successful program.“These are students who will probably always have special needs, but their condition will improve,” she said. “I think that because Botelle School is such a small school and all the teachers know all the students, I couldn’t think of a better place to put kids with special needs. They make a lot of progress.”
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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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