The Preemption Line

Amazing! When I draw pictures of naked girls, my readership jumps…

Have at it, anonymous pageviews!

Seven degrees Fahrenheit today – make that minus seven with the wind chill factor.

Supposed to go up to a high of twelve some time this afternoon. I guess it’s time to start hunting down that do-it-yourself bikini wax kit.

There was a big thaw on Boxing Day, temperatures in the forties. For the very first time I saw the path where I try to take Milo every day to run off leash. It was the old railroad track.

Once upon a time Freeville was the cross-over point for several of the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s regional passenger trains. There was a big hotel in town, a fair number of businesses catering to travelers. Railroad went bust towards the end of the Depression (though I believe train service continued until just before I was born) and today the village is a ghost town with a post office and a Congregational Church.

All the land around here was part of the so-called Military Tract, land grants given to the surviving members of General Washington’s rag-tag Revolutionary army for service above and beyond duty’s call.



I like this map – everything to the east of it was the known universe; everything to the west, The Frontier.

The Preemption Line still exists today – as Preemption Road through one of the Geneva’s transitional neighborhoods, but mostly as a lonesome dirt track.

In other news, heard from my beloved friend _____ that she’d a cardiac episode. Ended up in the hospital for six days. Something congenital, they told her; she’d been compensating for it now for years. In retrospect that makes some sense – she’s always had some odd things going on physically. Now those symptoms are gone, and she has a pacemaker.

Well, okay. Dick Cheney’s had a pacemaker for – what? twenty-five years now? Hasn’t interfered with evil-mongering. I fully expect _____ to a ripe old age as well, counterbalancing Cheney as a force for good.

Still. I can’t describe how inconsolable I’d be if anything happened to _____. It’s not as though we’ve seen each other very much over the past few years, but I’ve always had this sense that our lives were kind of like a shared hike on acid – that for the present we were off having our separate adventures in different parts of the woods, but that sooner or later we’d meet up together, compare notes, sit by the fire, watch the flames flicker and change.

I’ve been more-or-less incommunicado with the world holed up here in just-outside-Ithaca. I knew this was going to be a hard year no matter where I was, and I had this idea that it would somehow be less hard for me if I just didn’t talk to anyone till it was over.

But maybe that’s not true.

Anyhoo, I won’t be walking Milo today.