Yesterday: Don had just finished reading The Nickel Boys  by Colson Whitehead and he loved it. I suggested that he might want to follow up with The Underground Railroad, Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winner. As we try to buy locally, he called a bookstore in the neighboring town where he had purchased The Nickel Boys  via the phone and curbside pickup just a few days before. But they didn’t have it in stock. He called the used bookstore across the street. Didn’t have it on hand. Finally, he resorted to Amazon. In the meantime, I suggested Postmark Books, a shop in a neighboring town that I’ve shared with you many times in the past – great owners, terrific stock of books. I knew that they weren’t officially open to traffic; they were being wise and doing curbside pickup. Don wrote to them via their website and asked whether they had it in stock. Yes. They did. We hurriedly went to Amazon to see if we could cancel the order – we could. So Don bought it through Postmark and arranged for a curbside pickup at 2:30.

Suddenly, we were in the car and ready to take the beautiful drive into Rosendale, a drive we had suggested to ourselves as a future possibility the week before. The scenery along with way, all backed by the Shawangunk Mountains in the distance, is so lovely. There are farms and orchards and charming cottages and houses. One of the things that drew us to the East Coast was the fact that no house looked exactly like another house, though every part of the country has subdivisions, of course. But most every house that wasn’t in a subdivision was different from the next, some of them quirky, some of them magnificent, some run-down. We saw it when Don was working in the Berkshires and I visited him (we were still living in San Diego,) we saw it in rural New Jersey. And we definitely saw it here when we started looking for a house. That’s one of the things we love about this area. It’s very, very old, having been settled in the 1600s in some cases, in the early 1700s in others.

Anyway, we loved the drive; one we haven’t made in quite a long time. When we arrived, I put on my mask and ran across the street to get Don’s book. Then…we actually parked in a lot behind some shops and walked. Just walked. We looked in windows. We took pictures. We didn’t have to run an errand. We just walked, like we used to when we would visit an interesting town.

Before.

(Note: We live in the country and we live in an old part of the country where sidewalks are usually narrow and, as in our nearby college town, it’s hard to avoid brushing shoulders with people who may or may not be masked. So we usually avoid it.)

The bookstore. You pick up books from the box in front of the door. How I miss simply walking in a door and browsing!

New Yorkers are pretty good about wearing masks, though I saw one guy without a mask and let’s not talk about how many people filling up their cars with gas while we were doing the same were unmasked. Thank goodness Don was wearing a mask.

In front of a pet supply store. There were two of these masked dogs.

In front of our friend Elizabeth’s shop.

Elizabeth’s shop, which is the shop where we found the French Bistro table and the retro 40s patio chair we have in the living room. Right next to it is the Rosendale Theater which hosts an eclectic movie series.

A favorite house.

And us – in our masks from Kathy.

Anyway, the end result was a huge deal for us. We felt like we’d been freed from house arrest. The simplest things are the most powerful; the chance to amble down a street, doing nothing but observing, looking in windows, chatting – one of our favorite things to do and something we’ll never take for granted again. We felt lighter, more buoyant, and very happy.

We have to be cautious, of course. Don is nearly 70. I am soon to be 68. We can’t just take off and go anywhere, nor would we. But we have decided that we will take more of these little jaunts, trips we choose because we are pretty sure they’ll be relatively safe. No agenda. No need to go inside a shop. Not in the woods, though we love that. Not in our neighborhood, though we love that, too. Simply something that we now realize we desperately need: a simple walk on a paved sidewalk in a little town.

Stay safe.

Happy Wednesday.