Columns

I have been brainwashed. My mind is being held hostage – by Madison Avenue.

We moderns like to think we’re too enlightened to fear the darkness—too advanced to be spooked by a sound in the night.

Downtown Troy’s resurgence is a tribute to the resilience and relevance of its historic downtown buildings. Just as obvious as the economic success of our historic downtown, however, is the brokenness of our city’s process for protecting it.

Do you know the feeling of just going through your house, emptying closets, cleaning out drawers, then wondering how you ever ended up with markers in a clothes drawer or a butter knife in the bathroom? Things get mysteriously shuffled at our house. Even putting that aside there’s always a need of sorting through another drawer, getting rid of unneeded items or getting out bigger sizes for our growing children.

I was working in the kitchen, making lunch when I realized our supply of home-canned chicken was almost all gone.

A sense of relief trickles through me as I watch the children romping in the leaves for the first time. Summer is a highlight at our house. We love our daily bounties from the garden. No, we’d never do without summer, yet as those first leaves drop, it’s nice to have cooler and shorter days. At 7 p.m., it’s already getting dark, ushering everyone back inside where we enjoy family times together for an hour until it’s time to go to settle little ones down for the night.

Changing leaves are commencing to decorate the landscape with color. Just a precursory hint now—a daub of scarlet on roadside sumac, or Virginia creeper’s spiral of apricot-and-crimson twinning up a streamside sycamore.

Cool days are right around the bend. And yes, the children are ecstatic about it. Elijah was wondering if it’s going to snow now.

I blinked my eyes and checked again. Where is Daniel? I checked the children’s bedrooms to see if he was caring for one of them—no Daniel. Stepping over to the window overlooking our driveway, I blinked again and smiled, looking at the field beyond. Way back, in the back section of our 11-acre field, were the headlights of our tractor as he drove back and forth in the blackness of the wee hours of the early morning.

I’m having trouble keeping up these days.