Lisa Przystup on the measure of small things and how to make a home
Words and photos by Lisa Przystup
Over a decade ago, writer Lisa Przystup traded city life for an old farmhouse in the Western Catskills. Her work here revolves around the rhythms of rural life—the steady bustle of markets, the chatter of neighbors, or the intimacy of dinners at home. These small rituals, together, form something larger: a community and a lasting sense of belonging.
The Delhi Farmer’s Market happens every Wednesday. There’s a booth that strictly sells mushrooms, one that hawks local honey, another with San Marzano tomatoes so red and beautiful and fragrant that their magnetic pull draws you to them before you even know they’re there. If you find yourself holding one in your hand, it’s already too late. You’ll be powerless to do anything less than take it home, slice it up on a cutting board, and drizzle it with olive oil and a pinch of salt before popping its rubied glory into your mouth and muttering exaltations to the outrageous and simple flavors pinging around. There are booths with peaches and strawberries and blueberries and trout and corn in the summer. In the fall, there are squashes — delicata, honeynut, butternut, kabocha — in bins next to apples and constellations of fat, juicy, sticky-sweet concord grapes.
In addition to all the bounty, as mentioned earlier, there is also an abundance of conversation to be found circulating around the grassy square in front of town hall. Every Wednesday, as my husband and I head out on the seven-minute walk into town (ten to fifteen minutes if we run into someone we know, like Eddie, who mows lawns and is always up for a chat about music or the weather or any other thing that might be on your mind) we say out loud, “Okay we’ll be super quick — like, twenty minutes.” We have yet to meet that mark. Instead, we run into familiar faces, strike up conversations with the farmers who run the booths, and find a patch of sun to eat a taco from the turquoise truck that’s always pulled up alongside the market.
“Being upstate is a study in contradiction: being alone but not lonely, having to be fiercely independent while also allowing yourself to rely on your friends.”
Where we live is punctuated by rolling hills and ponds and cows and so many other things that, just by mentioning, feel trite and expected, and reduce our universe here to a stereotypical narrative of country life. Still, the truth of things, the ventricular muscle that beats at the heart of it all, are the people and community we’ve found in a town in the Western Catskills, three hours outside of the city, one hour and 45 minutes away from the closest train station (which is folly, really; at that point, you might as well finish the drive you started), and a ten minute drive away from the first farm to pasteurize milk in the United States (or at least that’s what the rusted out historical marker that sits outside the now rundown farm says).
If the people are the beating heart that drives connection, these dinners are the proverbial arteries that allow it all to happen. I was talking to a friend about community (how we built one, etcetera). My very first thought was that there wasn’t much about it to wax poetic about. It was simple: we were lucky enough to walk into one that had already been established, one that was supportive, warm, and accessible. One that perhaps doesn’t merit 1,000 words.
She told me about a conversation she recently had with a mutual acquaintance: They were talking about what sets this place apart from, say, the city, and they said something about the fact that they hadn’t opened their wallet to eat dinner in over a week. Which is to say that they had supped at various friend’s homes for seven days and counting. “In the city, you have to spend money to spend time with friends,” they remarked. “Here, you end up going on walks with the dogs or helping them install sump pumps or leaning in on some other random home project. Being upstate is a study in contradiction: being alone but not lonely, having to be fiercely independent while also allowing yourself to rely on your friends.” Part of that means hosting dinner one night and being hosted the next. It means that we’ve all had the good fortune to pull up a seat at a table in someone’s home, pass plates around, and ask for seconds and sometimes thirds while each of us talks about our day or the past week, all while the soft glow of warm light spills out the windows and into the night. It means cleaning up and doing dishes together, stacking and laughing about one thing or another. It means that before you know it, you’ve built a home and a community.
“Where we live is punctuated by rolling hills and ponds and cows and so many other things that, just by mentioning, feel trite and expected, and reduce our universe here to a stereotypical narrative of country life. Still, the truth of things…are the people and community we’ve found in a town in the Western Catskills.”
Our home is an 1893 farmhouse that we found after much searching about seven years ago. While I sat at my office job back in the city, my husband would pepper my inbox with an army of links to houses upstate. Some were dreams come true; others had wall-to-floor-to-ceiling royal blue carpeting that required me to look beyond and utilize my overly active imagination to “look at the bones.” Which, as it turns out, is harder than you might think. In the end, we looked at 19 houses before meeting our house on one of the last weekends of summer. It wasn’t an “aha” moment; there was no magical beam of light that opened up in the skies over the house, but it was a lovely thing perched atop a winding hill — musty smelling and full of potential.
Since then, we’ve planted garlic and dahlias, tended to blueberry bushes, shoveled our steep, windy 600-foot driveway umpteenth times, dug friend’s cars out the ditch at the end of the very same driveway, strung Christmas lights, stacked wood, fed fires, sat under the vast quiet of the stars, watched the fireflies, listened to the faraway yips and howls of the coyotes, woken up to 28 inches of the sparkliest snow you ever did see, argued about paint colors, and hosted family and friends.
Part of this ever-continuing home-making cycle includes the turning in that fall asks of us: the pile of wood we stacked in July gets loaded into the basement, the frost-browned plants in the garden get pulled out and composted as we prep the beds for next season, bulbs get dropped into the ground, clocks get turned back, and we start making a list of things we want to do in the spring. This is how our home was made, and this is how it continues to be made.
