To the east of me, a family of deer have gathered, huddled together, perhaps against the cold though it was warmed considerably since the plunge of two nights ago. To the south of me, on the creek, are gathered hundreds of geese that have made their first appearance on Claverack Creek in at least year.
Once was that there would be some geese there year round with a massing of them in the fall. Then they went away, just gone. It confused all of us in the neighborhood. Rosemary, one of my neighbors, phoned me of an afternoon to ask me if I had geese on the creek? No, they’ve gone. She told me they were gone from the pond, too; the first time in her forty years of coming to Claverack that there were no geese.
Coming home from the city last yesterday to see if my pipes had frozen, I arrived back in the light and to my amazement found my creek populated again with geese, noisy and rambunctious and almost as plentiful as ever.
This morning, to my great surprise, I woke to find four inches of fluffy white snow on the ground transforming our little circle once again to a winter wonderland. It was deep enough the snowplow came to dig me out. It felt good to wake to the clean and bright countryside.
As I was waking to the geese and fluffy white, two hostage dramas were being played out in Paris. A man held hostages in a kosher market while the Kouachi brothers, suspects in the Charlie Hebdo killings, were holed up, ironically enough, in a printing company. The man at the kosher market claimed he had coordinated his efforts with the brothers.
The man at the market claimed he was with ISIS, which, I think, is normally at odds with the group the Kouachi brothers were involved with, Al Qaeda in Yemen. I guess terror makes for strange bedfellows.
As I sometimes do when news is breaking, I went to twitter to see it unfold in almost real time. And while looking at the twitter feed and reading rapidly updated articles, I was sitting at my window, looking out at the snowy landscape and feeling distanced from the murder and mayhem in Paris.
Wednesday I had dinner with my friend David Wolf, a lawyer in New York, who also has a house in Connecticut, far out of town, surrounded by acres of land. We discussed the perspective being in nature seems to put on the news, how it softens the hard edges of the headlines.
It is quiet here; the only occasional sound is the snowplows clearing the street and the constant chatter of the geese. Quiet and peaceful in Claverack while half a world away there is chaos. I suppose it has always been like this, that there is peace and quiet in most places while others erupt in spurts of violence.
I am delighted I live in one of the peaceful spots where I can watch the sun slowly set in the west, a slight tinge of pink in the sky, a harbinger of better weather tomorrow. May the weather be better and may there be an outbreak of peace tomorrow, too.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 01 16 15 From the safety of the cottage…
January 15, 2015The sun has nearly set here in Claverack. The western sky is tinged with pink, which gives me hope for good weather tomorrow. It has been brutally cold here though not the kind of cold that has gripped the Midwest. I do my best to remember that when I am bitching about the cold. It is not as bad as the winters I spent growing up in Minnesota.
But cold enough that my cold water faucet in the kitchen seized up and refused to flow. All day I have been nursing it back to life with success finally coming around one this afternoon as I was settling down for a conference call. All day today the deer have been crossing in front of the window of my desk where I work. Going one way or another, they have crossed five or six times during the course of the day.
I was supposed to be in the city today but it seemed all my appointments had moved to next week. Except for the one I missed so I had to email a contrite apology because by the time I realized what I had done, no train could get me to the city in time for my appointment. I felt terrible.
While I have been sitting at my desk, the world has gone on its swirling ways. Reading the New York Times this morning with my morning coffee, I found myself falling into the stories of the day while feeling insulated from them by my presence at the cottage, far from the madding crowd.
The devastation caused by the most recent Boko Haram attacks is beginning to be known. Satellite photographs show whole villages wiped out and the enormity of that has been hidden by the attention paid to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. A young Muslim who was working in the kosher supermarket in Paris saved a number of hostages by putting them in the freezer and then making his own escape to tell the police what he knew. He will be rewarded with French citizenship.
There was a fascinating article I read online about the percentage of attacks that are actually made by Muslims against the number of terror acts committed over the course of a year. The author thought that Muslims were getting short shrift in the press, being blamed for more than their fair share of trouble. Perhaps they are getting the headlines while mainstream news ignores other terrorist acts.
During the afternoon, as I was doing emails and some research, the Belgians broke up a terrorist plot in Verviers, a town in the eastern part of Belgium. It is believed they were receiving their instructions from ISIS. Two people were killed in the raid and a third was taken into custody.
This is the drumbeat of our world. We have Islamists and separatists and God alone knows whom else wanting to create terror to achieve political goals. It probably has always been so but we now live in the interconnected age and so hear about everything, everywhere.
Sunnis and Shiites are massacring each other over a dispute that happened a thousand years ago. Can’t we get over it? I guess not. At least not yet.
So dark descends in Claverack. I will watch some of the Amazon Prime pilots that are premiering today. “Point of Honor,” a Civil War story caught my attention earlier today. As a member of the Producer’s Guild, I have been mailed a number of DVDs of current films and may watch “Into the Woods” tonight too.
I am settling down, into the coziness of the cottage, distancing myself from the drumbeat of chaos that is just beyond me, taking comfort in the deer that crisscross my property and in the geese that are inhabiting the creek outside my living room window. There is little I can do to alter the world outside. There is much I can do to make my world comfortable.
Tags:Boko Haram, Charlie Hebdo, Claverack, Into the Woods, Mathew Tombers, Point of Honor, Verviers
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