Duncan Bell and Jennifer Guinta
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In the spring of 2018, after successful business careers, Jennifer Giunta and Duncan Bell created Cottage Creek Gardens. They set up a plant stand on Route 9W in front of their half acre Valley Cottage property with a plan to sell plants they had grown from seed, as well as from plugs obtained from wholesale nurseries, and those they had propagated from cuttings and divisions. Several months later, after finding it difficult to secure their plants at night, the couple moved their offerings into their yard next to the house.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Margaret Mead

You’d think writing about a person like Eileen Larkin would be easy. It’s not. Eileen is a woman of enormous talent and drive. As her friend Susan Nemesdy says, she is “a force.”

Close your eyes and imagine a world where bread is the staff of life. Where flour, water, salt and time make for a primal alchemy – no thoughts of carbohydrates, gluten intolerance, or spongy tastelessness. It’s a nice place, isn’t it? Grandview native Chase Harnett, owner of The Hudson Oven, gets you there with gorgeous loves of fragrant, chewy sourdough dense with his passion for the craft. This is bread as it should be. The trick is finding it.

Judy Setsuko Hata and her husband Jack set down roots in Palisades before actually moving into their Dakota Street home. In 1956, after a drive to Congers to explore places to live, the newly engaged couple drove back along RT 303. Turning into Oak Tree, they were attracted to a model home for a new housing development, Palisades Gardens. They put a down payment on the last corner lot, then patiently waited a year to move in on September 1, 1957. Sixty-three years later she’s still here.

In 1978, perched high on a roof in Chicago, 19-year-old Aidan Quinn looked out over Lake Michigan and had an epiphany. He was working as a hot tar roofer and two buddies offered him the morning usual; a bottle of whiskey and a joint. Quinn says he had both in hand when he said to himself, “I’m going to be an actor. I’m going to find an acting class. I’m going to do something with my life.”

It is early. Lightning bugs drift around in the morning light like drunks after closing time. I was always a night creature too. Parenthood makes that a time gone. Long after our son is grown I got up early because the dog needed me. The dog is gone now too but I still get up early. I water and weed the garden instead. Plants that thrived on neglect (the plants outside and the dead orchid on the mantel inside a.k.a. “ole brownie”) are shocked by the attention. I garden and think about how I used to roam all over at this time with Sam, our dog.

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“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul…” From “The Chambered Nautilus,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Visiting Harriet at her home in Palisades is what I imagine it would be like to enter one of her stained glass works, if such a thing were possible. The angular house evokes the abstract, featuring space both negative and positive, and kaleidoscopic light filtering through the tree canopy and reflecting off the painted walls as the sun progresses across the sky. We enter a place where, as Harriet has said, life and art are inseparable.

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On February 24, 2019, Paul Pomeroy set sail for eternity after 87 years of scientific research. Born August 14, 1931 to Barbara Green and William Octave Pomeroy in Portland, Maine, Pomeroy graduated from Deering High School and received his B.S. in Geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in l953. After serving as an officer for three years at the United States Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, he started graduate studies at Lamont Observatory of Columbia University and received his Ph.D. in Seismology in l963.

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Gordon Kaye, 83, Alden March Professor Emeritus of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Albany Medical College and retired Chairman of the Board and Executive Vice President of WR2, died February 9, 2019 of complications from pneumonia.

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Frank Cheney Platt, advocate for poetry, poets, literature and writers, dedicated husband and father, died on February 26, in Rockleigh, New Jersey. A resident of Palisades for 25 years, Frank helped grow Poets House, a national poetry library and literary center now headquartered in Battery Park City. Poets House holds over 70,000-volumes of poetry and hosts numerous readings and talks intended to welcome the public into a dynamic discovery of poetry. Frank was committed to arts and culture as a means of protecting and cultivating principles of free speech in an open society. His son Arthur eulogized him as “a four-dimensional juggernaut of life, humor, anxiety, art and love.”

One day in her junior year at the School for Visual Arts in Manhattan, Palisadian Liz Mayer found in a Dumbo warehouse stairwell a cast-off costume box containing jewelry and fluffy fabrics. The artist scavenger in her saw the makings of a pillow so she took the stuff home and began stitching.

Nan and her paintings at O'Donoghue's
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On Friday, April 5, Nan Michelmore, a lively, warm, 89-year-old Palisades resident and an accomplished artist, became a United States citizen at a ceremony in Pomona, New York. She has lived in this country since 1966. Nan described the event for me, saying, “155 people like me from 43 different countries participated in the ceremony, a joyous diverse crowd, different in size, color and sex. I feel sure it was one of the happiest days of their lives.” She added, “We now can proudly join in voting and being fully part of our communities as American citizens.”

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Stanley R. Weber was born in 1923 to German immigrant parents in Inwood, N.Y. He was the youngest of four boys, all of whom served in World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 “like everyone else at the time,” he recounted, and after basic training was ready for deployment. In 1944 he marched down Oak Tree Road to Camp Shanks in Orangeburg past what would later be named Swan Street. His division sailed to England in July 1944 and he landed in Normandy, France, on July 17, 1944.

I was seven when my father received a letter from a friend in Trinidad. Its stamp, unlike any I had seen before, started me collecting stamps. It turned into a fascinating hobby and brought about a deeper understanding of both geography and world history. I have stamps from countries that have disappeared such as Serbia and Bosnia before they became part of Yugoslavia after World War II and from Fiume when it was a seaport, which Hungary lost after WWI. I have stamps going back to Queen Victoria and ones from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and Georges V and VI as well as one of Edward VII. A Belgian stamp from my father’s friend has a Nazi cancellation.

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Maybe you’ve seen a woman with red hair walking down Closter Road, being pulled by a pack of dogs and yelling at passing cars to slow down. That’s Barbara Meyer. The dogs, Kenny, Lily and Chance, are her failed fosters - “failed” because Barbara fell in love with them and couldn’t let them go.

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Robert Garrison Stevens (94) formerly of Palisades, NY died on June 26, 2018 in Greenville, SC. Born in New York City on January 26, 1924 to John W. and Matilda (nee Hahn) Stevens, he grew up in New Rochelle, NY.

I loiter quietly among the towering, overstuffed yarn cubbies at the Stitchery, Rockland County’s pre-eminent yarn emporium located in Pearl River, waiting for Adam Leber, the second generation proprietor, to be free. He’s in consultation with a customer about ribbon for a baby bootie project. He gently admonishes, “My mother doesn’t care for ribbon on baby clothes. This is what she does instead.” And he shows the customer how to make a cord that’s in fact much more interesting than ribbon. The customer asks him where he learned so much about knitting and he replies, “Everything I know about knitting, I learned at my mother’s knee…or in the streets.”

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It may be a bit early for New Year resolutions but here is one you might want to consider putting at the top of your list. It promises to reduce stress, improve concentration, enhance clarity of thought and help you become more positive. What could be better in these perilous times?

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On August 24, 2018, Sophie Breer suffered a cardiac arrest in her hometown of Minneapolis and passed away peacefully surrounded by her loving family and devoted husband.

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“Follow your bliss, and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” —Joseph Campbell

As she put it herself, Joan was a child of the atom bomb. The blast made her deeply aware that scientific advancement was outpacing society’s moral and spiritual development, and inspired her to devote her life to the pursuit of ideas. However, the way did not come to her in an atomic flash, but from years of living, first as she was supposed to, and then as she determined to, in a relentless quest to know herself and what it meant to be alive.