54.3 hours in the Berkshires

Our weekend with Garrett, Peter, and Matt

Friday

At 10:25 a.m. three weeks ago, Garrett texted us, “Just arrived! It’s beautiful!”, with a photo of his view: a mug (tea or coffee?) resting on the arm of an Adirondack chair perched on our leaf-strewn hillside looking out over the hills, with just a hint of his jeans and sneakers entering the frame from the bottom left to give the photo its aura of veridical interiority:

He continued, “I’m ready to move to Lenox.”

He’d just driven out from Boston. We’d been over at our apartment in the carriage house, so we walked over and had tea with him and talked local politics (which he weirdly follows) as a painter finished painting the very crooked side door to the Ostrich Room its new shade of green. I disappeared to the round room to work, where Adi was buzzing around preparing it for the next weekend’s new brunch service. Just after I joined my noon call, I saw Peter and Matt out on the porch, up from New York, and my coworkers saw me give them a giddy wave. I hadn’t seen Peter in at least a year, and I hadn’t seen Matt in closer to ten, and neither had met Claire.

After my call I hugged them by the coffee station and immediately asked Peter, who works in documentary filmmaking (and was carrying a Mubi tote), if he had seen Megalopolis yet. He hadn’t even heard of it! But Matt had, and hated it. We started desperately trying to describe it, the Adam Driver club stuff and the Neri Oxman design thinking and the real archival footage of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 shot by the Koyaanisqatsi cinematographer for the film’s second unit. I don’t think I asked how their drive was. A local reporter, Clarence, arrived to catch up with Claire after previously interviewing her the day after she took over in April. Claire introduced Garrett as a loyal reader.

When Claire first started looking to buy a hotel around mid-2022, she had a big thesis that Covid and remote work were effectively turning every weekend into a long weekend, making longer drives more worthwhile more often, increasing demand for longer getaways farther from major cities. That sort of abstract macro thinking receded to the distant background as this deal came together early this year — I’m not sure she ever mentioned it — but this moment supported it: the Berkshires as a meeting ground on a random weekend for no particular occasion for old college friends split between Boston and New York. Though the inn is hardly designed for remote work, it has good Wi-Fi (thank you Khaghans!) and enough nooks that we all disappeared from each other’s sight. (Or maybe they worked together and only I was alone?) At some point they got a late lunch at Olde Heritage Tavern in downtown Lenox (5 minute drive).

When we re-emerged before dinner, local jazz pianist Harris MacDonald was playing in the lobby. Claire was trying out booking music every day the bar is open (Wednesday through Saturday) instead of just Wednesdays and Saturdays. Garrett, Peter, Matt and I set off on a walk. They said they’d heard good things about Gould Meadows and, weirdly, I had to ask Claire behind the front desk which walk that was. It’s just a few minutes from us but I seem to learn these names and directions slowly.

The temperature had climbed to the low 70s; the leaves were nearing peak peep. Taking the route she suggested, we walked down the driveway and crossed the street past the old gatehouse ruins to the Kripalu entrance and started walking down their long entry road. But Kripalu is interesting in its own right, so instead of turning left at the second stake in the woods, we kept walking toward its front lawn. Kripalu was formerly the site of Shadowbrook, built 1893, which in the Gilded Age was the largest private home in America until it burned down in 1956. Peter noted an informational sign with a photo of a stone retaining wall and pointed out that the wall survives, which I had never noticed. I took a cute group pic of them in front of the main building.

We walked down that hill and turned left to walk back along the road toward Gould Meadows. The meadows are a sort of large indistinct green mass bordering the Stockbridge Bowl (a “great pond”) on the map, and we probably could’ve entered anywhere, but I made us keep walking until we hit the bright modern sign of the Berkshire Natural Resources Council marking an official entrance.

Why? Why wait for the sign? Why not just walk into what the eye can obviously see is a pretty meadow whenever you come to it? Am I missing the point of nature? How far have we fallen since the age of the fell and the “right to roam”? The historical imagery on Google Street View shows that the Gould Meadows entrance was only marked sometime between 2008 and 2019. (They don’t drive these roads that often.) Claire and I sometimes talk about how sidewalks are ambiguously pedestrian-friendly: on a fast American road, they provide a friendly, comfortable, and safe shoulder — but they also create a culture where the road is not inherently shared. By providing for the pedestrian, they relegate him; an option becomes a duty. Whereas a winding narrow cobblestone road in an old European city makes the pedestrian a first-class citizen by making no distinction. “Since thy original lapse, true Libertie / Is lost”¹ — license isn’t freedom; a pointer stops you from seeing.

Matt identified a shagbark hickory. Peter identified a bird. I could identify nothing.

We walked down to the lip of the bowl, which involved scrambling down a last steep little bit, and crammed onto a flat patch of dirt, and caught up on old mutual friends and inn life and such. Matt used to date my brother’s girlfriend. I told him I’ve often thought of him as some political issues he fought for in college have become more popular.

After we scrambled back up we realized that there was an easier designated path down to the water just like twenty feet farther on. Ah, well, better to roam!

I was eager to get back to the inn in time for the 7 p.m. bachata dance lesson in the round room, which I had promised to do with Claire. I could not convince the boys. As we got back and the lesson began, they headed for the Ostrich Room; a burst of check-ins started at the front desk, and Claire ditched me. But it didn’t matter, since we danced in a rotating inner and outer ring, and I met a lot of neighbors fast. I could see why people do this… I should meet more people! It was packed; we had to keep our steps tight. I learned that I should not shift my weight on the last step, so I can just tap that toe and reverse direction.

After the lesson, a few kept dancing but most headed for the bar. This thing has some good externalities for our business! Especially if you’ve just made friends, since there’s no other spot to eat or chat within walking distance!

I sat with the boys for dinner while Claire worked bussing tables. I got the schnitzel, Matt got the polenta, I forget what Garrett and Peter got. Maybe the lamb arayes? We had no live music in the bar that night but the hotel was almost full with leaf-peepers and there were the bachata dancers and I guess a bunch of locals because at the end of the night (10 p.m. on Fridays) we were at our all-time record net sales, $2,946. (It had been on pace to be slightly higher but Claire had comped the meal of a table that complained that things were slow or wrong or something.)

Giovanna is always adamant that she won’t push drinks on people… but on this occasion, y’know, you gotta at least ask, and we did get one more round of drinks to push it over the nice round number.² I got a Last Word and we talked about the monks. Then Giovanna cut her thumb cleaning the too-sharp metal grates you mix cocktails over.

We’ve noticed that live music attracts patrons but also depresses spending per patron because people just sit and nurse their drink to watch the show. Similarly, Tanglewood attracts hotel guests in the summer, but they all have somewhere else to be come dinnertime — as opposed to foliage peepers, who are more often here just to be here. So it makes some sense that we would set our record in the shoulder season on a night with an attraction (dancing) that got them here but didn’t preoccupy them once they were in the bar.

The boys went to bed. Claire and I went out to Ombra (downtown again, 5 minute drive), which seems to be the spot where the people who work at other bars and restaurants in town go after their shifts, because its kitchen closes at midnight (and the bar at 1:00). I love their double grilled cheese. Claire hadn’t eaten all day but we just missed the cutoff for food.

Saturday

We had talked about hiking Monument Mountain but around 9 a.m. Claire texted the group that she feared it’d be busy; she recommended the Alford Springs Father Loop instead — a 4.3-mile, 784-foot moderate hike half an hour from the hotel.

The boys were playing fetch on the front lawn with Max. We picked them up and headed out, picking up the day’s New York Times at the base of the driveway on our way. (I’m happy I can finally justify a print subscription.) We drove to No. Six Depot in West Stockbridge (from which we supply the hotel coffee station) for pastries and drinks. We sat at a picnic table outside and squinted to read Matt’s college thesis printed on his shirt.

Claire asked what “The Gay Science” meant and he explained as well as I’ve heard it explained. Claire made sure we walked down to the river running through the town to drill home this strip’s quaint charm.

The Alford Springs lot was pleasantly empty. The trail was nice and fairly flat, more of a rambling rolling meander. Six “vistas” were marked on the map, so as we walked we tried to count: is this a vista or merely beautiful? I caught a falling leaf and I think Peter did too. Peter kept exclaiming and appreciating and pointing to beautiful things around us, which was very validating for Claire, who always wishes I’d do that more.

We revisited Megalopolis and rattled off a lot of “have you seen” such-and-such, notably the films of Frederick Wiseman (which I’ve still never seen any despite a decade of Peter talking about him) and “The Bikeriders”. We talked about how close we’ve stayed to friends from different eras of our lives, if we’ve grown away from anyone, when we were the most depressed, what office Garrett should run for, and the questions raised by 9/11 truthers such as a certain someone’s brother (the gold, the Pentagon budget, the intact passport, the other tower). We sat on stumps and rocks for a water and Goldfish break and a man warily approached saying “No dogs?” and hustled past with his own small and apparently ill-tempered dog. In the end I think we only counted five vistas; we think one must have been behind us on an ascent we didn’t notice. I’d say most vistas were sort of narrow or flat; there was no clear panoramic peak or dramatic drop-off, if that’s what you’re looking for. But it was gorgeous and perfect for chit-chat.

On our way back I read aloud from the (print) Times about the downsides of commercialized marijuana. There sure are a lot of dispensaries around here; one day I want to do a newsletter about alcohol and a newsletter about weed. We stopped at No Comply (recently painted light pink) for lunch and ordered from Julie and waved to Steve in the back. Claire and I first came here in May, three weeks after we moved to town and two months after it opened; Claire had heard great things about it, and was rewarded by immediately running into a pizza guy she’d heard about, Rafi, who in turn had seen her on the front page of the Eagle, and they chatted for an hour; Rafi inaugurated our Berkshires social life and ended up introducing us to our now-chef Hagai and many others.

Anyway, No Comply was packed as usual and they’d run out of donuts but I loved my eggs and fries and things.

The room was dominated by what seemed to be an unusually large, young, and diverse group for the area; Claire caught on to this and asked a woman where they were all from. “Oh, we’re in school together.” What school? “Uh, ohh, one of the evil ones, Harvard Business School…” For what? “We’re in a social impact group.” Staying where? “At an Airbnb nearby. It’s so beautiful in this part of the world!” OK, thank you, thanks for gracing us with your impact!

One of Rafi’s pizza guys, Salem, spotted us on his way out the door and waved his McDonald’s souvenir cup. He’s a bit of an a McDonald’s influencer, roadtripping to all the weird ones, followed by corporate.

We kept heading back toward the hotel, through Stockbridge, past the Red Lion Inn, heading for High Lawn Farm. But then Matt said “I think there’s a street with my last name around here” so we turned around and backtracked to find the Mary Hopkins Goodrich Memorial Bridge. (There’s also a street but the bridge seemed prettier.) It turned out to be a very lovely footbridge over the Housatonic River leading to some train tracks and a tantalizing trailhead. We spent a while trying to walk balanced along the rails before continuing back past out past the Red Lion Inn again as I tried my best to retread our conversation verbatim as we retread the road, as if you could step in the same river twice, which was not as amusing to anyone else as it was to me.

At High Lawn we headed straight for the calf barn (only open ’til 4:00) to give them a pat while Claire selflessly waited in the especially long line for ice cream. Patting the calves calms me. I got a coffee milkshake as always.

We all went back to the hotel and returned to our rooms. I don’t think I actually fell asleep but I did lie down. At 7:25, I texted the boys that I was gonna skip dinner but that they should go to Pizzeria Boema in town, which they did while I showered. Chantell was performing (singing, with Josh Hirst on guitar) in the Ostrich Room at 8:30; I had been out of town the last time she sang here and everybody had raved about it. I headed over right before it started; the room was packed, by our standards. It’s not like a shoulder-to-shoulder mosh pit lol, but most chairs were taken.

When I saw Claire she remarked on how the fire pit was especially lively and crowded, like seven or eight people, and asked if I could take a picture of it for Instagram, so I went out there and asked the girls and they were like omg of course sure yeah. They said they had guessed Max’s name and I was like what? And then one said, well, I looked at the tag, but they did guess, and I was like, what does that mean? Then another one of them asked me if I used to live in New York and I said yes, long ago, and she asked if I had worked for Businessweek, and I said yes, agog, and the whole fire pit was like what?! and she said my mom is Ellen and I said oh my God I’ve seen you on her Instagram and I shouted “New Jersey from a safe distance!!” and they were like yes!!! (That’s Ellen’s favorite caption for photos of the Jersey City skyline taken from Manhattan.) They’d all gone to Bates, so I said Christian had gone to Bates, and they exclaimed “Christian!! Bring him out here!” so I got him and they all screamed “Christian!!!!” and he was like “Uh hi.” And I said my Bowdoin friends should be back from town soon too.

Inside, watching Chantell and Josh, Claire’s old high school classmate Catherine was sitting with her husband by the inglenook. I talked for them a while about our various issues with Expedia (future newsletter), the local lore of a gym shutting down because it was either mis-zoned or training a communist militia, and her husband’s research about inferring a company’s true competitors from noisy data.

When I went back out to check on the fire pit, the boys had gotten back and were already well-integrated into the circle. And I realized one guy I hadn’t really noticed before and had assumed was their pre-existing friend was in fact someone they had just met who’d come up from Kripalu. They were well beyond learning names; they were all exchanging their neighborhoods and addresses in New York and someone mentioned a café and Peter pulled up his sweater to reveal a t-shirt branded with that very café. They’d identified that some of them had ultimate frisbee in common. One of them described to me her thesis on whether some set of like magical animals was closed under the operation of some magical machine.

I was running around all night stoking the three fires (lobby, Ostrich Room inglenook, outdoor pit), as I’d been eagerly awaiting all summer. And the next time I went out, the fire pit crew were giving each other relationship advice and trading old frisbee nicknames and surveying the circle on whether the believed in ghosts. One girl said she doesn’t believe in ghosts but she believes in “spooky”. And then the next time I went out, the girls were leading a round of fuck/marry/kill about members of the boys’ Bowdoin class I couldn’t believe they could name. It was as if every time I looked the friendship had advanced another year. Before they left I took a group photo and someone disappearing into the night shouted that Garrett is fucking hot.

They barely saw any of the music! Only if they went in to get a drink or go to the bathroom, I guess. But it feels nice when there’s enough going on in different places that no one person gets the whole story.

Once the Ostrich Room was shut down we went out to Ombra again, missing the food cutoff again, this time with the boys, and spent most of the time trying to describe the fire pit scene to Claire, who had entirely missed it. She said the one time she went out there they had all shouted “Claire!!” and she’d just been confused.

As Claire drove us back to the hotel we blasted the 1978 song “Rasputin”, by Boney M., because one of the boys loves it, maybe Peter. But the drive is short, so it was just getting going as we approached the driveway. Claire sped up — I thought, we’re either in for a hard turn or she’s got a good idea — and we blasted past the inn to keep listening. She pulled off at Olivia’s Overlook and left the car on as we danced in the small parking lot over the Bowl. After the song we shut off the lights; the sky was especially clear, the stars were especially bright. We could see the Milky Way faintly — the first time I can remember seeing it in many years — and saw a shooting star. We stood looking up for a minute of silence.

Sunday

After snacking on the continental breakfast on the porch, the boys packed their bags and checked out and we took the scenic route walking into town, about an hour and a half: coming out of our driveway, turn left onto Under Mountain Road and follow its L-shape as it turns into Cliffwood. We saw the ducks at the Stoneover Farm pond, detoured down the Parsons Marsh boardwalk to the birdwatching lookout, and saw the horses at HomeFarm. Claire remarked on the various stone walls along the way and how some of them seem underloved and she’s always tempted to just start stealing them; Matt, quipped, on-brand, “mix it with your labor and it’s yours!” Peter and I bragged about having caught leaves yesterday so Garrett and Matt spent a while trying and eventually succeeding in catching leaves of their own. Claire remained aloof and did not try.

In town you gotta check out the Stebbins fountain!!! I am kind of joking, kind of not. Claire noticed it a couple months ago and now shows it to everyone. It is easy to miss, a tiny stone basin with a little faucet on top and a dog bowl on the bottom where Cliffwood meets Main Street. Emma Stebbins was born in 1815 in New York City; she moved to Rome to pursue sculpture and met an American actress, Charlotte Cushman; they exchanged vows and described themselves as married. After their return to the U.S., Stebbins sculpted the “Angel of the Waters” for Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain in 1873 to honor the Croton Aqueduct bringing the city fresh water. Cushman died of breast cancer in 1876; Stebbins spent her final years writing Cushman’s biography, and spending her summers in Lenox, and she died of lung disease in 1882. They had no children. The fountain downtown here was dedicated to Stebbins’s memory the next year by her friends Janet, E.O., and Emily. Claire derives tremendous joy from it — from the fact that it seemed Italic to her even before she looked up the backstory, and from the fact that it was Emma’s female friends who gave it to the town.

We considered Haven but skipped the probable line and got sandwiches and chips and drinks at Loeb’s Foodtown. Matt had the good sense to also get some caramel Bulls-Eyes. We took our food over to the community center, which I had never been to, and sat on the grassy hill as we waited for Rory to show up to give me a tennis lesson.

Rory arrived and burst out laughing at my tennis whites. “Are you sponsored by Nike? You look ready for Wimbledon.” The superficial polish didn’t exactly match my skill level. A minute later her mom Jill came up, having parked the car, and laughed at me and said, “You look ready for Wimbledon,” and I thought, ah, that’s where she gets it from. I will say that I hit better than Rory had guessed I would, since I could get it over the net with some accidental topspin and sometimes complete a slow but legal serve. Peter played a few rallies and was more Rory’s speed.

Mid-lesson, Peter and Matt took off for New York; we hugged them goodbye and thanked them profusely for coming. Garrett walked back with them to the hotel.

Rory attempted to deconstruct and reconstruct my serve and I emptied an entire large hopper of balls trying to serve “the right way”. I struggled to even aim at the right court with the continental grip, but I was happy to be reminded that I should at least be holding the racket farther down for a longer lever with more of a wrist snap. Every single ball in the hopper went outside the service box except for maybe one of the last ones. We tried rallying again for a few points but my poor form was deteriorating further. Jill gave us a ride back to the hotel; they gasped to see it repainted green.

Garret was still hanging out and hopped in the pool (no longer heated this late in the season) as Claire grilled him about his past relationships. I wavered by the lip of the pool for like five minutes and finally jumped in for my first time ever here. I immediately made for the ladder and got out, but it was pleasantly bracing.

On Garrett’s way out we made him come with us back to HomeFarm for their open house. We walked up and down the barn patting every horse. Apparently they do trail rides all winter so long as the ice doesn’t get too bad. I was so excited about the prevalence of horses out here when we moved but I didn’t get on one until Friday.³

We hugged Garrett goodbye there in the parking lot of the farm around 4:45.

As Claire and I flopped down on the couch we felt it had been a perfect weekend. For one thing, she was able to actually largely take the weekend off, which would’ve been inconceivable even a couple months ago. It had been well-paced and varied, adventurous but relaxing, pleasantly hectic but without crises. And we love Garrett, Peter, and Matt. In a way it can be lonely out here, but when e.g. my friends come Claire gets to know them better faster than she ever could’ve in San Francisco or Boston, and vice versa for me and her friends. Like at Bowdoin, the void of the surrounding woods are like the lead tamper around a nuclear core, reflecting the energies of the inn back inward to sustain longer and larger chain reactions. I knew I wanted to write about it for the newsletter, just a linear diaristic account, like one of those New York Times “36 Hours” pieces, which I thought would make for a good title.

Four days later, to my surprise, the New York Times published its updated installment of “36 Hours in the Berkshires”. Many of their stops will be familiar: No Comply, Boema, and No. Six Depot all show up, and they even call out the specific charm of West Stockbridge. I have learned over the years that Claire and her friends are good at spotting these spots before they show up in the Times. It’s interesting to compare the version from 2014; maybe we can get on it for 2034.

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Changelog

The inn has been repainted green! Claire has long dreamt of this; we thought we were going to have to wait until the spring but Memo was able to pull together a ragtag ad hoc crew fast. I think it cost about 30 grand over two and a half weeks, if you’re looking for a comp for your own 13-room 3-floor historic inn building or want to tell us we overpaid. Learn more in our Instagram reel.

Hagai and his wife Adi have opened a separately branded brunch restaurant, Baladi (BALL-ah-dee, بلدي, Arabic for “local”), in the round room, after a couple of test runs with friends, family, and guests, to provisional rave reviews. (It needs a better web page.) Clarence’s write-up in the Berkshire Eagle, following his visit mentioned above, was published on Friday. It’s nice to have lots of updates for him!

Recently asked questions

“Do you have bottles of water?” — We have a big water jug and glasses you can take up to room; does that work? (No, they wanted a bottle.)

“Do you have laundry bags?” — No.

“How do I turn on the air conditioning? Our room is kind of hot.” — We took out the window units for fall, so there’s no A/C in there now, but we can at least turn down the heat.

“If I want to go on a run tomorrow, is there a track that would be good?” — How long? “Six kilometers.” Claire goes “uhh”; he laughs “Like three and a half miles.” She says down driveway, turn left, onto Under Mountain Road, then Cliffwood, into town, back on West St. But that turns out to be like 5.8 miles, so we say maybe he can just double back.

“We’re flying out [back to Denmark] late tomorrow from Stewart International Airport, so we have almost the whole day; is there anything you’d recommend on the way from here to there?” — Olana and the town of Hudson. We hadn’t even heard of that airport; it’s across the river from Beacon. Go figure!

“I just took a photo to show your wife — it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just funny — but we just trapped about fifty ladybugs in our room. We’re Buddhist, so we won’t kill them, we just trapped them. We won’t leave a bad review or anything, but… could we maybe get a free drink at the bar to take our mind off it?” — Lol, sure.

“I know the restaurant is closed but could we see a menu?” — Normally we stock one by the front desk but I couldn’t find one and had to go into the tavern.

“What’s this music?” — Leonard Cohen! Claire’s away and I’m in control this time. Just nonstop Leonard Cohen. “Oh! I recognize a lot of the songs but I couldn’t place the name…” What would you put on? “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. Well, I’ve been playing a lot of Kris Kristofferson, since he died…” Normally our music is more broadly hedged, but I went all-in on Leonard tonight, and about six people have remarked on it, how well it pairs with the fire, how they never realized how many good songs he has, how poetical his stories are.

Guest book

A 71-year-old man proposed to his 71-year-old girlfriend on the front hill. She said “You better get down on one knee!” and he said “Only if you’ll help me get back up!”; he did and she did. Claire got them glasses of Prosecco. They’d been planning to eat dinner at a place called the “1762 Inn”, but we couldn’t find any trace of such a place existing, so Claire recommended Heirloom Lodge (15 minutes away by car), which they loved.

Last weekend — i.e., the weekend after “the boys” visited — was also pretty perfect, so everyone who came then should feel righteously offended that I didn’t write about them instead. Nina and Chris came out for their friend Bravo’s wedding at the Mount, and they roped in their friends Liz and Zane. Bravo grew up around here and I was honored to meet him briefly (in the capacity of his guests’ designated driver) at his afterparty at “Heritage House”. J. Z. and Etienne happened to be visiting the same weekend with their adorable 2-year-old daughter Apolline, whose outré signature in our guest book I will treasure.

I especially appreciated that J. Z. introduced us to ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, a surprisingly touching documentary about the South Park guys saving his childhood by pouring $40 million into his favorite restaurant from childhood and thereby saving his memory of childhood itself. It held some surprisingly salient lessons for us, like: you shouldn’t buy a building until you inspect it, but you can’t inspect it until you can dig into its walls, but you can’t dig into its walls until you buy it. And: you might have to pour $30 million into making the building’s innards safe, which nobody will even notice, before you can even begin to spend $10 million making the building’s visible experience marginally better.

We were also grateful to have the Bildner and Lenehan families come for the new Baladi brunch service last weekend, and grateful to Ann Volkwein and Linda Campos for coming to write about and photograph it.

A couple who’d stayed here the second week we were here came back this week. Merely returning is flattering enough, but it felt especially flattering because they had seen us when everything was new and scary and had a baseline against which to measure how far the hotel has come — which is to say, they were able to say to Claire, “You got the restaurant open!”

1. I shouldn’t be trusted to quote Milton, since I only got up to book 9 or so of Paradise Lost, and I think I’ve been mistaken for 15 years about a margin note which I only remember said something about freedom vs. license. I’ve always thought it was about “license” as in “a fishing license”: Satan might think himself free to go fishing, but he forgets that he is merely licensed to do so by God, who can revoke or overrule that freedom. Thus, a marked trail entrance or pedestrian sidewalk gives over true roaming freedom to an implicit licensing authority. But based on search results like this, it sounds like Milton was actually talking about “license” as in “licentiousness”, maybe more like John Henry Newman’s “false liberty of thought”: e.g., if you indulge your freedom to drink alcohol without discipline or reason, you may find yourself, not free to drink it, but in thrall to it.

2. The next weekend we hit $3,700, and I think this weekend we hit $3,200, but we expect those numbers to fall with the leaves.

3. I rode a horse for the first time ever in 2021 on the mountain behind the Madonna Inn and I was shocked by how much I loved it; I realized that horses are beautiful and sweet and smart, and, to put it in cybernetic terms, I had never before steered something with such a benevolent will of its own. I’d only ridden three times since but I’m always itching for more. Umaimah said Islam loves horses, “the noble animal”, because the devil can’t get into them. According to Equestrian Hijabi Sportswear, in turn citing al-Bukhari, the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said “Goodness will remain in the forelocks of horses until the Day of Resurrection.” I had called Hayley at Berkshire HorseWorks to try to organize a ride for Claire’s birthday back in June, but the timing didn’t work out, and I kept getting distracted, and we only managed to get around to it for my birthday this past Friday. We showed up and Hayley said “Hi Tophalicious!” and introduced us to a big beautiful white horse; I thought, great, we’re gonna ride this horse! But no: that’s Zephyr; he’s too old and his back is too bad to ride him, but they love him. Then we met three more: Spirit, Dubs, and… what was the third… Gunner? We patted and groomed them for a while to form a bond as the Sicilian donkeys nudged our butts for attention. (Asked about donkeys, the Prophet said, “Nothing has been revealed concerning them”.) We took each of the three on a walk around the paddock and Hayley asked, “Which one do you feel most bonded with?” We were like, I don’t know, you tell us; we said I’m timid and she said “OK, you’re on Spirit,” because he’s the alpha. And only then did we mount up and head for the meandering trail through the dense and colorful woods. The result of all that “wasted” warm-up time is that we felt right at home, as if we were taking our very own horses out for a ride — a good lesson in hospitality!