Wine Country and Other Places

We were on the road this month, attending class reunions and memorial services. It was a catch-up across the board. In our case, we were constrained from traveling as innkeepers for many years. In others, the pandemic clamped a lid on reunions and memorial services.

It was good to get out and see the country. We made two trips across New York, once to Canada (high school reunion), once to Geneva (college reunion) and Ithaca (son at graduate school). And then to Maine.

My high school is on the Niagara frontier. They started planting grapes there for wine when I was a boy. As a college student in the Finger Lakes – still pretty much a boy - I remember the vineyards going in along the shores of Lake Seneca. No one paid much attention in either case. It was only a few vineyards. There were no bus tours or tastings. The output for years was limited to ice wines and sweet Rieslings.

Today, the vineyards of Niagara and the Finger Lakes dominate the agricultural and commercial landscape, and there are many varietals. We enjoyed reds as much as whites. There are buses everywhere. Plus, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, guided tours, no parking signs, people from around the world, and kiteboarders. We spent an hour or so each afternoon outside our hotel at the top of Lake Seneca, wine glasses in hand, watching kiteboarders careen across the water, occasionally launching in the air to twist and turn. I approached a tall, blonde, athletic-looking fellow packing up his rig to inquire about the sport, but I think he was Swedish. We managed to say hello and goodbye.

Niagara-on-the-Lake, in Canada, was like Hancock, NH, when I was a boy spending a couple of weeks there every summer - small and neighborly. We could be independent at young ages, going everywhere on our bicycles. It remains possible to go everywhere on a bike in Niagara, except the sidewalks. The sidewalks are now full of pedestrians that stop every ten feet to peer into the windows of each tempting shop. I bought an Irish cap to replace the one I purchased in the same store years ago, and Marcia picked up relish and chili sauce from Greaves jams, which has been there forever. But the owners do not live above the store anymore. Above the store is now Greaves Sweet Escape luxury accommodations for $527 a night in high season. If the price does not overwhelm you, do it. The location is perfect. The pictures look great. Careful swinging the door open in the morning, so you do not hit anyone on the sidewalk.

Then it was Maine for memorial services. Freeport and Damariscotta. Lobster, the ocean, more amazing restaurants and shopping possibilities. But it is the rugged coastal landscape that stokes the imagination in Maine and the classic farmhouses with attached barns. We have a few of those in New Hampshire but not many inland. I think it is more about the wind than the cold because it gets colder in our part of the country than it does along the seacoast. I would have no objection to stepping through my kitchen door into the barn to fetch an armful of wood as opposed to going outside.

The memorial services were about family. In one case, we had waited two years to celebrate the life of an aunt. She died pre-vaccine. As a choir member for most of her adult life, singing hymns brought her joy. She sang hymns driving in the car to the market. When her brother was dying - my father - she led hymns for us around his bed. Thus, we waited for a time when we could comfortably gather to sing hymns to celebrate her life, which is what we did that afternoon for a solid hour. Hymn after hymn. It was great fun, precisely how she would have wanted it.

The other memorial was also for an aunt who died earlier this summer. She lived in Peterborough for the last several years of her life, which allowed us to reconnect after many years. I spent a lot of time in her house as a student at that Canadian school because she lived in Buffalo, and I would visit on long weekend vacations rather than try and make it back and forth to southern Connecticut, where my family lived at the time.

The service for her was in a little brown church that you could imagine as a picture in a children’s storybook. Cozy. Warm. Muted. Casual around the room's edges with tables of books, stray articles of clothing left behind, and a spare space heater. A man played the piano in the corner. The minister, in jacket and tie, was a fine Yankee gentleman. Because it was not obvious, I asked him about the church's denomination. “Whatever the minister of the time wants it to be,” he said.

From the church, my aunt was taken by the immediate family to be buried on an island next to her late husband. Not bad at the end of a full life to exit through a small church in a small Maine town to rest on a quiet island.

We drove home on Sunday from the second trip to central New York, the last one of our month on the road, past the wine country around Ithaca, through rolling hills of farmland to Route 88, up to the New York Thruway, dodging tractor-trailers and mobile homes on our way East to Albany, then Route 7 into Vermont, up the mountains, down into New Hampshire, across to Keene and in under the canopy of the forest to our cabin on the pond.

Everyplace else is tempting. It is raining now. I have put the plants from my office over the barn outside on the porch for a drink and to have a change of scene of their own. I wonder if they imagine living outdoors. At the moment, they are huddled together, enjoying the rain.

All that is left is orange on the trees. Orange leaves and needles carpet our driveway. I am going to fetch wood from outside and bring it inside.

I am not going anywhere else today.