Those of us with older houses are used to a certain degree of uneasy cohabitation with wild creatures that view our residences as good places to hole up for the winter. Our indoor cat, though she came to us without her front claws, is nonetheless a champion mouser and has yet to run out of prey. We have thus far been spared infestation by swarms of invasive harlequin ladybird beetles that plague other buildings, including my office, as soon as cooler weather arrives. I once found a bat in my bedroom, and managed to usher it outside without either doing injury to the other. I came home one afternoon with a small space of time before my children needed to be retrieved and taken to various appointments, and decided that I would tackle a small plumbing project to address a leak in the downstairs bathroom. This, too, is commonplace for those of us with older houses. I went down to the basement to get some plumbers tape and returned it within 15 minutes. I did not leave the door to the cellar open for longer than it took to descend and ascend the stairs, because the cat would like nothing better than to prowl around down there and I am not altogether sure the basement is unoccupied. I trapped and removed a red squirrel down there about a month ago, and where one can go another may follow.Finding I still had a quiet moment, I decided to put my feet up on the living room couch and read for a short while before heading out to fetch my children. Unscheduled personal time is at a premium at this stage in my life, and I enjoyed almost 10 minutes with my book before checking the time and wistfully setting it down.As I got up from the couch, I noticed something odd on the wall behind me. Above my writing desk hang a number of old Confederate banknotes, matted under glass in a large picture frame. The frame was askew and something dark was weighing down the upper right corner. For the briefest of moments I thought it might have been a child’s sock, but the image resolved itself to my great astonishment in the form of a very still, very much alive red squirrel.I think it must have gained access to the house when I opened the basement stairs, and may have taken to the wall when either I returned or the cat passed by. At the time, though, I was more interested in how I was going to get it outside without throwing off my evening schedule by taking a detour to the emergency room for a rabies shot. I remembered that when we bought the house there was a green mesh fishing net hanging on the wall in the basement, and for all I knew it was hanging there still. I admonished the squirrel to stay where it was and went downstairs, where I found the net as if it had been left for just this purpose. I closed various doors in the house so that if, as I suspected would happen, I was not immediately able to ensnare the squirrel, it would have a limited number of options for flight and mayhem.The squirrel saw me approach and decided that it needed to head for higher ground. It leaped from the picture frame to the top of a bookcase, then over my shoulder and back behind the lowest shelf of books. I placed the net behind the volumes that it could cover, and naturally the squirrel found the gap and headed off like lightning for the dining room. It briefly considered worming its way behind another standing bookshelf, then thought better of it and dashed into the kitchen. I intercepted it in mid-flight and it attempted to jump from behind the kitchen table across the room toward the range, and brought the net down with the table beneath and the squirrel within.The squirrel then set about forcing its way through the monofilament mesh of the net. I quickly tossed my coat over the net, carefully tucking it under the opening of the net and hoping to avoid the teeth of the captive in the process. I then carried the whole package outside, closed the back door, and removed the coat — to find the red squirrel wedged halfway through the net but unable to proceed forward or back.I again told the squirrel to stay still and went back for a pair of scissors, with which I carefully freed the animal from the grip of the mesh. When I cut the last of its fetters, it scampered off between the house and the utility shed, and I set the ruins of the net aside and went off to fetch my offspring. I am not altogether sure that the squirrel is not, even now, lurking in my basement, but as long as it remains down there and avoids the upstairs floors we shall have an uneasy détente. At least, that is, until I have a free moment to reset the Havaheart trap. Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.
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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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