Three raincoats and two hats

Inside a stone cottage, in the middle of the woods, hang three raincoats and two hats. The cabin smelt of winter and firewood, and between the railings and banisters small webs had formed. But this place felt like a home well lived in.

I met a man who told me stories of what autumn was like here with his family, wearing those same jackets and caps that have hung there now for years. He leaves them there because every time he passes, they remind him of his family. His children are all adults now, and his wife passed away two years ago.

His life now is a series of commutes from the city to what is now a weekend home, and he makes fewer trips each year. "Time waits for no man," he said. He told me he had just been to another funeral, for one of his friends, that morning. It makes you think about how life moves in a series of chapters, and however much you enjoyed one part, the story must continue.

As sad as it may sound, there wasn't much sadness in his eyes. He still had a great deal of joy for life, and as he spoke about the leaves drifting down in a small gust and sitting on the porch swing, the smile on his face told me it had all been worthwhile.

What's in your house that makes you smile, every time you look at it?

The Harlem Valley

The Harlem Valley is the name for the rural towns and hamlets of eastern Dutchess County, about 65 miles (105 kilometres) north of New York City. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy counts Pawling, Wingdale, Dover Plains, Wassaic, Millerton, Millbrook and Beekman among them.

The name came with the railroad. In the 1840s the New York and Harlem Railroad pushed north from Manhattan by an inland route, which was easier and cheaper to build than one along the Hudson. That route was given the Harlem name too. The line reached Dover Plains on 31 December 1848.

Wingdale is a small hamlet in the southern part of the town of Dover, on Route 22. At the 2020 census it had 1,051 people.

The station in the tag

Harlem Valley-Wingdale is the Metro-North station here. It was built to serve the Harlem Valley State Hospital next door, and until 1977 it was called State Hospital. The hospital was a state psychiatric hospital. It opened in 1924 in buildings first meant for a prison, and it closed in 1994. Part of its grounds is now the Evangelical Center.

The station sits on the Harlem Line, which still runs from Grand Central Terminal. North of Southeast the trains change from electric to diesel, and the line ends at Wassaic.

Time waits for no man

His line is an old English saying, more often heard as "time and tide wait for no man". The Cambridge Dictionary says it means people can't stop time passing, so they shouldn't put things off. The tide in it is the old word for a season or a while, the one that survives in Whitsuntide and in "good tidings". Robert Greene had both words in print in 1592: "tyde nor tyme tarrieth no man". Chaucer made the same point about two centuries earlier, in other words.