Gansevoort, NY (Moreau Lake State Park )

Needed to stay around to take care of some business at the Post Office so we took the opportunity to do a couple of things we had wanted to do, anyway, before we pulled out. One was to photograph the covered bridge in Woodstock in the morning light…and the other to visit the Billings Farm. It is a restored 1800’s working farm. I just had the best time. The summers that I spent on Aunt Mary and Uncle Howard’s dairy farm came flooding back. I love the smell of a barn…the sweet smell of hay and the warmth of the cows….to me it’s the smell of childhood and carefree days. And the long line of cows at the milking stalls. And the calves….one was trying to suck on my jacket. When I was a child I used to help teach the babies that had just started to wean off mama. I would let them suck on my fingers and slowly lower my hand into a warm bucket of milk. I hadn’t thought of that for years. On the farm (of my childhood)…there was an abandoned barn…I spent hours there…hiding in the bales of hay and watching the dust motes drift down in the shafts of sunlight, and dreaming. In the old wooden slatted feeding troughs the barn swallows used to build their nests….I would pick up the baby birds and hold them so carefully and feel their heartbeats race against my hand.

Only got a couple of hours of driving in before this state park called. Talked to the park ranger…a wild Cerval Cat escaped his owner and is living in the park. Has an abundance of food since the chipmunk and field mice population is up from all the rain they had this year. The ranger was upset at the owner that didn’t know what she was doing and allowed a wild animal to escape…said it’s lucky that it has nothing to mate with…since all the efforts to catch it had failed.

Rick started a fire tonight. I stood out there with him and toasted my backside and looked at the moonlight through the trees…it’s so still, the only sounds are the wind and the acorns dropping from a tree nearby…The campground is all ours except for one other rig…far away and out of sight.

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