A year in the life of a Catskills village
with illustrations by Elizabeth MacFarland
Cornwallville, New York, where I live, lies at the very northern end of the Catskill Mountains. I was born and brought up in western Massachusetts, but I can claim some sense of roots here since I have Dutch forebears on both sides who trace back to the nearby Albany area.
My hope is that this journal will give people alive now, and perhaps in the future, some idea of the natural and human rhythms in a place that is very different from the urban centers where, two decades into the 21st Century, four out of five Americans now live.
Like the diaries of earlier periods, the journal’s main focus is on the small things that make up a large part of everyday life: the weather, or who said what at last night’s town board meeting. But it also includes (to a modest extent) discussions of thoughts and feelings, something the early diarists almost totally avoided. Rural Americans’ values are different in some ways from their urban counterparts, and the journal attempts to make those differences more understandable to non-locals.
This journal isn’t just for outsiders, though; it is also intended as a way of recording and honoring the lives of my neighbors and friends. Above all, it tries to provide a sense of life as it is being lived.
