Shabbos In Tannersville

For many years I had a quote on my refrigerator to the effect that one should not go back to a place where one had once been happy.

You might think that this is a contradiction for someone who is very into creating traditions, but a recurring yearly event with the family is not quite the same as returning after an extended absence, to a place filled with childhood memories and expecting to find everything unchanged - because it seldom is....

I spent nearly all my childhood summers upstate in Tannersville, NY and many of them in this home.

(You can see from these photos why, after I had children of my own, I was unable to fathom the allure of going from a cramped city apartment to an even more cramped bungalow for the summer...)

(You can also spot the dilapidated gazebo in the second photo where I spent many a rainy summer afternoon channeling Liesel from The Sound of Music singing "I am sixteen, going on seventeen" while skipping from bench to bench....)

I returned to Tannersville shortly after I was married and it was a painful experience. Time had not stood still. Memories which were still fresh in my mind, led to expectations of moments frozen in time, but the reality was that life had gone on and the "landscape" had changed.

Somehow though, as more time passed and my personal expectations changed, when we received an invitation from Michael and Annette to spend a Shabbos with them in their home, which coincidentally is across the street from the aforementioned house, I was once again eager to revisit familiar ground.

As we progressed up the thruway to the point where the sky seems to get larger and bluer with each passing mile, I could almost feel the stresses of the week dissolving within me.

This is the idyllic view from their backyard.

Michael and Annette are consummate host and hostess and we had a FABULOUS time. We began the weekend by doing a bit of "antiquing" in a neighboring town and then had a relaxing late Friday afternoon sipping coffee on the deck at Point Lookout, where the view encompasses five states. Have you ever known me to relax and sip coffee on a Friday afternoon? I'm still not sure how Annette managed to pull that amazing Shabbos together.....

Shabbos morning had me up early (well... early for me...) and in the shul, which I found quite unchanged, except for the alarm signs in the front yard and the unsightly energy efficient bulbs now gracing the fixtures. It is a strange experience sitting and davening as a grown woman in a pew of a shul that one has only sat in as a child. It was almost an out of body experience.

We enjoyed a "gemutlich" Shalosh Seudos at Samson and Judy's house and stayed until the men returned from maariv, so that we wouldn't have to face the bears (another new and unwanted development since my childhood) alone on our trek home. (I figured that if I let Avram walk in front of me, by the time the bear was done with him, he wouldn't have much of an appetite left for me {grin}).

Motzoei Shabbos found us playing Scattergories and Bananagrams and Sunday had us visiting Olana, the Persian style home of famed Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church. A quick stop at a local farm on the way back to the city, yielded us what seemed like bushels of fresh picked corn, eggplant, zucchini, peaches, pears and plums for this week's zwetschgenkuchen.

All in all, I'd have to say that in the G6's version of the Fodor's Guide to Tannersville, it receives four and a half stars!!! (It lost the half star because of the bears. This is because I lost half my MIND listening to Jennifer clap her hands wildly to scare them away every time we walked outside at night....)