Most days upstate, we’re tearing pages from the Iron and Wine songbook. Big box stores it is not. Yet here we are in midwinter at a first light trip, a county away from our Hudson Valley home, to a twenty-four-hour Walmart, the approximate armpit of the American dream. I’m loading remnant boxes as we start packing house. Where we're headed, there are chickens in front yards.

We're moving again, inland, a mile up the main street of Cold Spring, down a dirt road to a stone home in a thicket of woods. No bollards and no paving stones here. Straight to a forest dark's dark, lit only [...]

In the lower reaches of the Hudson Valley, daytime hours now are well fastened with fall's rust. Red-yellow patches freckle hillsides, leaf pilings assemble curbside. But lately it's nightfall here in our semirural surround that has us most absorbed.

What could be better than making it in New York? Try leaving it. We did.

It's no secret: high atop the list of quintessential rites of New Yorkers, natives and newcomers alike, is sewing periodic escape. Country weekends, second-home summers, holiday sublets-people of privilege, you affluentials and your toothsome spawn, I salute you to enjoy your view while it lasts. For my wife and I, your countrytime staycation has become our new year-round rural roost.