The field in front

Kids will find all kinds of enclosures to make their own “houses”—bean poles, a shelf of mossy rock, or maybe the sweeping underneath of the front yard willow.

My children found “The Fern House”—a circle of interrupted fern nearly five feet in height that created a growing, green room in the old hay field below our home in French Woods. (For those unfamiliar with the northern reaches of TRR’s coverage area, French Woods is about five miles north of Long Eddy on Route 97 in Delaware County.)

It is the farm that I grew up on and now own with my sisters—which has been in our family since the 1840s.

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From the Mississippi to the Delaware, from Canada to the Catskills—a river runs through it

Lady Luck and Mother Nature must have conferred this week and decided to give the Catskills a break. It is comforting to know that despite dire predictions of thunder and lightening, flash floods and hail... somehow the old girls know that we river folk are hardy stock and the show must, and will, go on.

How appropriate that the Forestburgh Playhouse (in conjunction with RiverFest?) decided that ‘Showboat’ would fit nicely into the season. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II joined forces to create the memorable tribute to life on the Mississippi and director Sarah Norris “took the helm” and produced a lovely production, replete with a book and score that has stood the test of time.

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