Today is picture postcard fresh in middle Westchester, with a high in the mid-70s. It went down to the low 60s overnight, so we slept with the window open. As with many late summer visits over the last couple of decades, I find myself migrating around a Berridge household, searching for the best place to plunk down with a mystery novel, a process somewhat challenged by an excess of bric a brac and a reticence to make tough decisions about paring things down and making the space better because, after all, the stuff belongs to someone else (in this case, Susan, who has long since decamped to Austin), because it does support human weight when you sit on it and is therefore by definition furniture. Then there's the question of the wall hangings and decorations, which are all Southern Woman, though the house has long been occupied by two Northern Men. Makes no sense.
It's all good and at least there is central AC, of which the Berridges somehow never deemed themselves worthy in 47 years in Larchmont, but I must confess I miss looking out at the Long Island Sound, the saving grace of that old house. And the Sound itself, being so deep in the crook towards New York City, was always a pale shadow of a true seaside summer location.
Which in some sense begs the question of what the hell we have been doing all these years piling up all of these dollars, storing, saving, squirrelling against the risk of what conflagration? In full knowledge of the fact that we can't take it with us. Yes, the money can be bequeathed to future generations, but at what cost to enjoyment in the present? Is this inward-turning crouch really reflective of nothing so much as fear, is it not its own form of disability?
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