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One More Woman with Her Bags Packed by Holly L. Thomas I hear more and more women saying "coffee" through their noses. "Off" has become a two syllable word— "ooh-wuf," accent on "ooh." Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

One More Woman with Her Bags Packed
There’s a lot happening in New York City, but you pay a high price for it. In the fifteen years I’ve lived within a train commute of the place, I’ve done an excellent job of staying away, but now the city is coming to me. Here in insecure Poughkeepsie, seventy miles north of Times Square, people are starting to run red lights and stop signs just like they do "downstate." Bird-flipping is becoming standard practice on local highways, which are being widened and strip-malled, the better to serve those spun-out by Manhattan’s centrifugal force. Worse, the accents are starting to change. I hear more and more women saying "coffee" through their noses. "Off" has become a two syllable word—"ooh-wuf," accent on "ooh." It used to be that some people in New Jersey said "youse" when they should have said "you" and some multi-generational Hudson Valley folks did too, but there the similarity between the two accents stopped. No more.

My boyfriend is a minstrel raised in Southern California in the ’60s and has lived more places than I’ve visited in the decades since, but has never spent more than three consecutive nights in the five boroughs. Yet even he is starting to sound like a Brooklyn truant, a waitress in some diner off ("ooh-wuf" ) exit twelve of the Jersey Turnpike, and a bag boy in the Bronx. He’s a musician and a natural mimic so he can’t help it, he says. I say ("I sez," if we stay here much longer) it’s time to run.

We live in the Mid-Hudson Valley, a complicated, beautiful, and historic region of Washington Irving tales, Dutch barns, tribal place-names, and Rockefeller money. Still full of farms and country estates, it’s also a place IBM made cocky with suburban prosperity until the company’s three largest plants here imploded a few years back. Now we lure New Yorkers northward to buy our farms and homes, and to shop in our outlet centers. We invite them instead of resisting them.

Understand that I’m no urbanophobe. I love the Met—both the opera and the museum. It’s a groove to walk down Fifth Avenue on a spring day when the cameras outnumber the tourists, and I can go two crowded blocks without overhearing a conversation in American English. Central Park on a summer afternoon has a thousand different impromptu concerts and roller-blade demonstrations to choose from, and a bazillion dog, human, and sportswear fashion combos to observe. It’s one of the places that gives me hope that we all might one day learn to get along with one another. And the unsung places I won’t identify never stop working to rejuvenate the city and the people who care about it. Still, if I wanted to live with the pressure New Yorkers accept—if I wanted to adopt the attitude with the accents—I’d already be there.

Instead, I’ve kept my distance, always exhausted by a day’s visit to the concrete canyons, and eager to get back home. I have turned down great jobs that would have made me a commuter, one of the growing crowd that buys strong coffee and the Daily News at the Poughkeepsie train station in time for the 6:20 express to Grand Central every morning. The New York license plates on my ten-year-old Honda have rolled past stop signs in nearly every coastal state and maritime province, but they have never accompanied me onto Manhattan Island. I’ve stayed away from Times Square for fifteen New Year’s Eves in a row. Although I have been to Yankee Stadium, I have managed to avoid concerts at Madison Square Garden, and I have never carried a Bloomies bag.

My relationship with New York City has always seemed balanced. The pendulum has predictably swung between love and hate without getting stuck at either end of the arc or pausing too long in the center. I’ve lived just close enough to enjoy an occasional dose of the place, but not too close. Yet now the attitudes and the accents are spreading northward into the fringe of farm country. IBM’s void is being filled by anything we can attract. And houses whose values went down with Big Blue’s work force are being marketed to people willing to sleep here and work in the metropolis. It’s time to move on while we still love this area, to give the newcomers a little more room. Before my sweetheart can teasingly slip into a "Yo! You gunna knock ooh-wuf the typin’ an eat wit’ me, o’ whut?" without even making me wince.

Profile
Holly L. Thomas arrived at the potluck with Tony. I’d never seen him in a tweed jacket before. Holly was beautiful. Beaming, glasses sparkling. Clutching her stories and poems. We sat on a bed piled high with overcoats. She read. I listened, oblivious to the clamor and buzz of painters, models, art directors who crowded my Highland, New York apartment. Stomachs growling, they waited, while we stuffed ourselves on hard-to-resist prose and verse.

At that point Holly was still a high-profile land use planner. At work you’d glimpse a woman who’d outgrown a carefully built career, still doing her stint for Dutchess County. Camouflaged in business attire, pacing, she’d speak in low, flat tones. Spare sentences that gave nothing away. Inside she was raring to break loose. Through the 1990s I sketched, painted, and wrote with Holly. I heard her pass, ruminating, through seasons of speculation, her heart in West Coast cafes. Curled on the deck on sunny winter days, or down at The Balancing Act deli pouring tea, she’d laugh aloud, writing. Or grumble, pen wiggling furiously. She pieced out plans, and, between notebooks and pages, packed her pine cone collection and tub toys, and consoled her cats. Crossed off the lists on her fridge. Finally, blotting lots of spattered ink with soggy Kleenex, came "This is the Last Time" poems, and the Westward Ho theme for her moving sale. In ’96, her staid stint in New York over, she set out, without her business suits, for Seattle.

Her work is about changes, omens, and renewals, the pitfalls of deadening and questionable security, the humor and sanity in seeing blessed, beckoning risks. I just received a card she sent me while traveling cross-country. It shows a man who threw a line into the night sky and walked out onto it.

—Annie LaBarge

Bio
Holly L. Thomas
Place of residence: Seattle.
Birthplace: Schenectady, New York.
Grew up in: Albany, New York and New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Day job: Former land use planner out East. Now freelance writer, poet, and student of my new surroundings.
Education: B.A., Dartmouth College.
Serial publications: Government documents related to land use and environmental issues. Local news and reviews for the Harvard Common Press.
Awards: For creative writing? Ask me again in five years.
Current project: A collection of poems.
Favorite book this year: The Little Notebook by Nicole Gausseron.
Belief: Non-denominational Christian.
Craving: Time within earshot and sight of big surf.
Favorite radio station: It’s a toss-up between KPLU and KUOW, local NPR affiliates.
Preferred music: Jazz.

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