Skinny Dipping

[2.xii.24.a : lundi] This house where we are staying in Rosendale which backs up to the Rondout River is cold and drafty. It’s below freezing outside, so … even though the heat is on, there’s still a chill in the air. I recognize that chill. It’s the same chill that used to be in the air at our house on Long Island during the winters. Last year, we took out two low-interest loans and reinsulated our house and replaced the heating & cooling system with more modern, more efficient units. Now there is no chill in the air at our house. No matter how cold it is outside, we’re toasty in front of our fireplace.

Twenty-one years ago, when we moved to Long Neck, we didn’t know precisely how long we’d be living at that little house on Fishers Way, but I didn’t imagine that I’d be living there during my retirement … that stage of life is still a decade or so away, but now that we’ve made our house a home, we’re reluctant to leave it any time soon.

Back in September, when Alice & I were at the Zen cabin in Stonington, Connecticut, I revised and polished a little book that bears the title: A Succession of Zen Cabins. I’ve been proofreading that text for the last two mornings we’ve been in Rosendale. In chapter 8 of that little book, I recorded a conversation we had with a bookseller in California who asked us where we were from. We said that we lived in New York, but we weren’t from there. I know what you mean, he said. But where are we from … at this point?

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Yesterday, Alice & I were driving through High Falls on our way to Accord when we saw a new bookstore, Blue Heron Books. I put on the signal and turned into the parking lot — can’t drive past a bookstore! I bought a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a book I’ve skimmed through many times before, but never yet purchased. Now was the right time, I thought. I’m ready for “indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teaching of plants.” When we got back to the house on Lawrenceville Road, I read the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass, the one called “Skywoman Falling”. Kimmerer tells the story about how Skywoman fell to the earth and how Turtle Island came to be. Skywoman wasn’t from Turtle Island. But Skywoman came to Turtle Island and made it her home. She became indigenous to Turtle Island, so that if anyone asked Skywoman where she was from, she would say, I’m from Turtle Island. Skywoman wouldn’t make any distinction. She wouldn’t say, I live on Turtle Island, but I’m not from there. I’m from the Sky. When one becomes indigenous, when one makes a home, such distinctions become meaningless.