Showing posts with label Bovina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bovina. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Autumn in (upstate) New York








A misty morning drive to Bovina for an egg sandwich takes me through this gentle upstate landscape. Rolling hills dotted with farmhouses, barns and the occasional Airstream, milk truck rolling down a country road…My crush on pink peonies and orange roses has given way to a deep love of russet, apple, pumpkin, the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of acorns dropping.


It's becoming an annual ritual for me to post this poem by Rilke. (2013, 2012)
The poem that gave me orchards in space.


                             Autumn

     The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
     as if orchards were dying high in space.
     Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no".

     And tonight the heavy earth is falling,
     away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

     We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
     And look at the other one ... It's in them all.

     And yet there is Someone, whose hands
     infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

                               -Rainier Marie Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)



The best thing about blogging is the friends I've made, and I'm not going to call you virtual friends either. I love that New Zealand Amanda's posts about spring coincide with mine about fall, and that when I am shoveling snow she will be sharing her peonies. It truly is a world wide web, both infinitely large and comfortably small.

xo, Jen

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Bovina earmarks

Bovina is a tiny village in the Catskills, lovely and rural. There used to be many family dairy farms; now very few. I wanted to buy a house there just so I could say I live in Bovina. So much more etymologically interesting than Andes or Margaretville. (There is also a nearby town called Delhi. Pronounced "Del-hi".)


Speaking of etymology, thanks to Bovina Town Historian Ray LaFever, I now know that earmarks aren't just Congressional pet projects--they are identification marks on an animal. Bovina farmers used them to identify their sheep. Mr. LaFever found, in the town records, a book of earmarks dating from 1820 to 1836. Next to each farmer's name is a description of the earmark and some drawings. You can read more on Mr. LaFever's blog, and I must give credit to the Watershed Post where I first read about it. Now, isn't that interesting?