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. READ MORE

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. READ MORE