The Finger Lakes

Back from the Finger Lakes where the memories swarmed like gnats on a sultry day, so intense that I found myself ghostwalking through the present tense. Watkins Glen in the midst of a tourism revival. Downtown Montour Falls bustling. Even tiny Millport showing signs of mercantile revival.

Dunno why I would have expected it to stay the same.

The Seneca Lake wine industry is booming with as many as a hundred wineries crowding the shores where a decade ago there were fewer than a dozen. Maybe the wines are good. I wouldn’t know. I’m no wine maven, and I particularly dislike white wines like the Rieslings and chardonnays the region is famous for.

Still, it was un peu disconcerting to see most of the apple orchards cut down, the shores covered with vines.

On the last day of the trip, I ended up in Ithaca. This was not the first time I’d been in Ithaca since I’d lived there, but it was the longest amount of time I’d spent in Ithaca. I went for a walk, revisiting a few of my old haunts, thinking about how miserable I’d been there, wishing I could somehow reach out to my miserable, plucky self imprisoned there in there in the past, wishing I could say, A time will come when you won’t be happy exactly, but you will be indifferent…

Seems like most of my life has felt like an afterlife in one way or another. When I was actually living in Ithaca, the before was California; when I was living in California, the before was New York. If I unriddled the tangle far enough, possibly I could follow the before into some past life.

Always, always, the undercurrent is… Well. Not regret exactly. More this keen sense of poignancy because it’s all so transient. It moves slowly, like a glacier. You can delude yourself that it’s not moving at all. But once it’s moved, there’s no going back.