No Further Than My Own Backyard
Well, it had to end sometime.
No, I’m referring to my two-week vacation, which I’ve mostly used to unpack and organize things, with a healthy helping of passing out on the couch and recovering from all the activity. Turns out, if you’ve spent the previous 14 months working from home on your butt and not really doing anything? Suddenly multiple days of carrying stuff up and down stairs and shifting boxes will do a number on you.
And while not every family member is completely excited about moving…
My crush on my new little house remains unadulterated, even after two hours of mowing the front and back yards last Friday evening! (The little house has its own Instagram, over at @wiz_manor.)
There are so many little things to love about the house, including all the amazing woodwork. Consider, for example, this beautiful built-in in the dining room!
It may be original to the house (built 1953), but I’m not sure. As you can see, it’s enormous, with plenty of room for all my wine glasses.
And this humongous drawer, to hold pretty much every piece of wine paraphernalia I might ever need.
The bottom cabinet is the liquor cabinet and related glassware, which is a whole ‘nother topic for another day.
(And if you’re thinking, boy, some lights in that cabinet would really help, I totally concur, and it’s on the list of future upgrades. But it needs something more permanent, more elegant, and less janky than the battery-powered lights I just put in my bedroom closets.)
Speaking of wine (as I really ought at some point, to keep up truth in advertising) what is a vacation, if not an opportunity to drink wine in the middle of the afternoon.
May is Finger Lakes Wine Month, which is a little ironic as the time I visited in May two years ago was one of the chilliest and dampest visits I’ve made to the region. (October, you want to go midweek in October. If you want to discuss it further, hit me up.) But in honor of this fact, and the fact that apparently my wine collection is overweighted in red blends, I brought this 2016 Hector Wine Company Essence up from the wine cellar (my basement).
Gorgeous, no? I’m talking about the garnet color of the wine, not my lush lawn which I mowed my own self last Friday evening. The wine has a funny little bit of effervescence first out of the bottle, so I’d recommend decanting before enjoying.
Hector Wine Co. is on the southeast side of Seneca Lake, one of the largest and definitely the deepest of the Finger Lakes. Essence is a blend of cab sauv, merlot, and cab franc. The 2016 was an even split between the three. Black cherry is predominant on the palate, with a hint of forest floor. Tannins are soft and not overpowering at all. It’d go great with a New York strip or a beef tenderloin.
So while it’s still challenging to travel to the Finger Lakes at this point (check out Hector’s website for the restrictions still in place), I’m reminded of the words of a philosopher from Kansas: “…And it's that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with…”
Truer words.