Out On to the Catskills

My daughter’s teacher had handed back her paper on the ‘Song of Roland’ and suggested she needed to support her assertions about women with quotes from the text.  I pulled down our copy this morning and thumbed through quickly looking for any and all references to women.  Setting out I was already fairly convinced that this would be relatively easy as there would have been next to none.  I was largely right.  I found precisely reference to woman.  Early on being honorable to “wives” is mentioned and towards the later part of the song, we are introduced to two actual women: Bramimonde the heathen Queen of Zaragosa who sees her way to God in the end and Roland’s gal, Aude who perishes two lines after discovering that Roland, himself, has perished. 

We’d been talking about and miraculously somehow we actually motivated on heading out today to Olana.  I haven’t been there in a decade, more like two.  But it always holds a special memory as a place designed to evoke Asia as much as it was to invoke Columbia County.  We headed up 87 and it went fast enough.  Before long we were turning on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.  I was asked but couldn’t recall that the story was penned by Washington Irving.  And soon it is clear to anyone with a pair of eyes exactly where our destination is:  There, up on the hill. 

The first thing we heard in the parking lot was Cantonese.  An older guy and a lady of approximate vintage were communicating in Cantonese in the parking lot which is to say they were yelling.  We plodded down from the car park with its huge water tower, down to the visitor’s center where they informed us that there was a tour starting right away.  The Cantonese couple joined our group, they suggested they were from Long Island and we from New Paltz. No one here from China.  And soon we were on our way. 

The views are astounding, 'hide and reveal', on the winding path up to the house.  Our guide had a British accent and it helps to lend a tone of seriousness.  The Arabic over the door says: “You are welcome,” we only learn because my little one asks the question.  The flourishes are Persian but no, Frederic Church never made it to Iran or Iraq or Egypt either.  He made it to Turkey and Jerusalem and Jordan though and these are evidenced in the many flourishes within.  I hadn’t realized the tall, north facing lit room with a wall for nothing but painting was built that way on purpose, to showcase the art he’d collected on his European trip. 

Later, we see his wife's portrait and consider her petite chair and the fact that she was only four-foot-ten-inches-tall.  In the western room we considered his time in Mexico.  Alas the second floor was closed in the winter but the porch, though cold, had an absolutely majestic view of the river and the complementary lake he’d had built to balance the bend in the river but most remarkable of all is the view out on to the Catskills, across the river, back in Ulster, that I’d never really considered before in all these years of living here.

On the way out we saw a number of lovely things in the gift shop.  I settled for a refrigerator magnet soon we were on our way down to visit my old pal and his family who live in Tivoli some twenty minutes back down the river, the way we came.  It’s time for lunch and he's ready for us. 

Sunday 12/15/19