Cumming-Parker verando overlooking the Hudson River. J. Burgher House overlooking the Wallkill River.

The Wallkill Valley Land Trust (WVLT) will present its third annual “Houses on the Land” house tour on Saturday, June 1 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. This year’s tour will feature a rich variety of homes and gardens spread across the Town of Esopus and highlight the town’s distinctive terrain. Visits are planned to historic properties primarily situated beside the rivers and creeks that define that town’s boundaries and crisscross its rocky and picturesque interior — early stone houses along the Rondout Creek and Wallkill River, glimpses of Rifton’s Civil War-era industrial past, a Quaker farmhouse on the Old Post Road between the Black Creek and Swartekill watersheds and several stylish homes built for New York’s turn-of-the-century elite with majestic views of the Hudson. The tour will conclude with a visit to the grounds of John Burroughs’ “Riverby” and a viewing of the great naturalist’s “bark” study (a precursor to “Slabsides”).

Tickets are $25 if purchased in advance through the Land Trust’s website www.WallkillValleyLT.org or $30 the day of the event. Admission includes a reception following the tour at the Global Palate restaurant in West Park. On the day of the event, tickets, brochure and map will be distributed 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Dutch Reformed Church on Main Street (between Decker Avenue and Greenkill Road) in St. Remy. Proceeds benefit the WVLT’s land preservation efforts. For more information, call 255-2761 or visit www.WallkillValleyLT.org.

Albert and Catherine Becker with the portrait Catherine commissioned for their first wedding anniversary. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Fresh out of high school, Albert Becker left his family to work at a newspaper in Lawton, Oklahoma. He wasn’t much more than an Iowa farm boy when, at 19, he decided to leave that newspaper to join the Navy and serve in World War II.

“I saw I was going to get drafted — I just knew I would. So I went home from Oklahoma and I joined the Navy,” Becker, now 89, explained. “I was born and raised in Charles City, Iowa. That’s where I come from.”

Becker went on to become a father of two kids, a grandfather and great grandfather. He got a job at IBM, where he worked for three decades before retiring. The couple had lived in their home in Gardiner for 61 years.

Since January 2013, Cathy and Albert Becker have been living in Woodland Pond senior living center in New Paltz. In late April, Becker went with the group Hudson Valley Honor Flight with other veterans to visit the National World War II Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. Honor Flight is a group with branches throughout the country that flies World War II veterans to Washington, DC — both to honor them for their service and to let them see the WWII Memorial, completed in 2004.

Blown up by a U-boat

Becker left Iowa on a bus with about 30 other young recruits his age, heading for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center — on Lake Michigan, halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee — for boot camp. He got assigned to the Navy Armed Guard, training to become a gunner protecting merchant ships hauling ammunition and supplies to the warfront.

Almost right out of training in 1943, the young sailor shipped out of Brooklyn on a ship called the SS City of Flint, heading to Casablanca in northern Africa.

“It was a real old doggy ship, that I wouldn’t be surprised if Columbus was on it,” Becker joked.

Built back in 1920, just after World War I, the City of Flint was an old steam ship that had encountered the Germans in 1939 — just months before the U.S. officially got involved in the war. Eventually, it was returned by the Norwegians and retrofitted by the U.S. at the Baltimore shipyards. When Becker got aboard the ship, it was hauling a cargo of airplane, jeep and tank parts, ammo crates, gasoline in large drums and telegraph poles.

“The harbor at New York at that time was just full of ships preparing to go,” he remembered.

They joined a large convoy — between 35 to 50 ships — headed for Morocco. When the group hit a storm in the Atlantic, the commodore ordered the merchant mariners to fall back. Becker’s ship was a little older — retrofitted but a little slower than the other vessels — and it was bleeding cargo that enemies could easily spot. “He says, ‘You’re leaving a deck cargo of telephone poles. That’s a trail for the submarines to follow.’ So naturally, we lost the convoy intentionally.”

Becker’s shipmates intended to rejoin the formation once they could secure the cargo and throw the Germans off their trail. “We pulled out. We fixed up the telegraph poles. After we got that squared away, we took off,” he said. “We were doing fine. We were making good headway. We sailed two days alone. On the second day, we’d just secured for the night. Myself and a lot of my buddies were on gun watch.”

A German sub, a U-boat, had found them. But the crew on the City of Flint didn’t know about it until it was too late. “We got a call over the intercom that they’d spotted a torpedo coming. Well, they no more told us that the torpedo was coming and a torpedo hit us. I think that ship is still coming down. It just blew sky high.”

The torpedo had blown the bridge completely off and the bow was sinking. On the aft gun at the rear of the ship, Becker had to decide quickly how to survive.

“It was going down,” he said. “There was gasoline fires, and debris flying, and you have it. We were on the after gun, and we decided we’d better get off the ship. ‘We’ being me and my gun crew. So we all split up and got off the ship, got down in the water.”

Nearby, the Nazi submarine still lurked, shelling anything seen moving above the surface of the water.

“To get out of there — because the water was on fire, and so full of debris, you couldn’t go nowhere — so myself and a buddy of mine went back aboard the ship, crawled up a rope and we got a raft down so we’d have something to be on.”

A lifeboat emerged through the smoke and chaos, picking up Becker and his friend. They ditched the raft and joined nine other men on the lifeboat.

“We had two oars in the boat. And we took turns two at a time rowing that boat the whole night long — just to get away from there. We managed to escape the area,” he said.

They knew that three other lifeboats had escaped, but they were nowhere to be seen. “Evidently, they went one way, and we went another way just to get away from the ship.”

Team America was a force to be reckoned with in the bed races at last weekend’s SpringFest in Highland. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Hundreds of residents and visitors braved the Irishlike weather this past Saturday for the second annual Highland SpringFest. The weather held until just before the signature events of the festival, the Waiters’ Race and the Bed Race, both of which had everyone cheering, lining the sidewalks and enjoying some old-fashioned community fun and competition.

“There are so many different things happening, spread out all through the hamlet, that it doesn’t look as big as it really is,” said Kate Jonietz, the chair of Highland Events Committee. Jonietz and a team of volunteers were busy getting the Bed Race teams lined up, in heats, in front of Town Hall.

The reigning champion, Mid-Hudson Cross-Fit, certainly looked the part, with a bed that included a mat, a dumbbell for a headboard and exercises bands wrapped around the foot of the bed-on-wheels. The team members also wore T-shirts that read “I Look Better Naked because I Cross-Fit.” They had nine other five-person teams (one driver and four who would push the bed) to contend with, including the decked-out Highland Police Department wearing prison jumpsuits, dark shades and pushing a police-car-fashioned bed-vehicle.

Then there was the Highland Fire Department, who had a mini-firetruck bed, complete with a siren that rang after the team members completed their “Chinese fire drill” and sped towards the finish line. There was the Squidwrench bed, made out to resemble Squidward of SpongeBob; and the Kingston Nissan bed, which sadly did not have Nissan-inspired steering and crashed into the sidewalk several times before arriving at the finish line. The Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union bed was decorated in cash, but also had a tough time making that tight turn towards the finish line.

At the stop sign, all of the team members, including the driver, had to stop their bed-vehicle and run a complete circle around it; then the driver had to turn around and race backwards.

After several rounds of competition, the final two were Mid-Hudson Cross-Fit and the Lloyd Police Department. It was a close race, but Cross-Fit pulled it out in the end, defending its previous title and taking home $500 in cash. The police received enough pillows for the entire department, and the Highland Volunteer Firefighters were awarded the Most Creative bed prize, to the tune of $250.

Katie Peura was there to celebrate the day and cheer on her son Nathan Peura and his fellow firefighters during the Bed Race. “I love the small-town feeling of this festival,” she said. “I know those boys were up all night responding to an accident and haven’t slept, but they’re here because they love their community. With everything that goes on in the world, this sense of community is very important.”

One resident, Jim Faucett, whom some dubbed the “Mayor of the Bed Races,” had designed his own red velvet top hat with springs attached that held up a miniature bed. “I like to be festive and see the community out and about,” he said.

“What I love about this is that there’s nothing political. It’s just about supporting your town, your local businesses and having fun with friends and neighbors,” said Denise Chiara.

There were vendors and raffles, dance shows and karate exhibitions, a deejay who was announcing the bed races and waiter races and then music that kept people dancing well into the night. “I just like the feeling of community togetherness and friendly competition,” said Rosalie Peplow, the longtime town clerk for Highland. “It’s so much fun!”

The event was sponsored by the Town of Lloyd Events Committee and the Highland Downtown Business Association.

Pillows off to all who made it such a fun and successful event, even with the rain coming and going. The weather didn’t appear to dampen anyone’s spirits, and people were literally dancing in the rain!

The creative minds behind Squidwrench (standing L-R): Daniel Veith, Mike Kershaw, Amanda Kershaw, Matthew DeHaver, Scott Gibson (owner Studio 81), Teresa Moronzano, Pat Cutty and Michael Gulak. Seated (L-R): Doug Masiero, Bruce Locke, Ed Nisley and Sean Swelha. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Studio 81 is a small workshop occupying a space accessible by an alleyway on Vineyard Avenue in downtown Highland. Recently, a group of programmers, artists and electronic wizards — calling themselves Squidwrench — have started to meet there.

They’re what’s called a hackerspace, or makerspace — a creative collective of young professionals who meet to collaborate on projects. It’s a place where an artist working on a project that might benefit from moving parts and blinking LED lights can reach across the aisle for help from an electronics whiz.

“We’re trying to make this as comfortable a place to just sit and do work as possible,” explained Sean Swehla, who helped found the group back in 2010. “We do Android development days and things like that.”

They hold workshops on the graphics editing program Inkscape. They’ve done demonstrations on 3D printing. They’ve helped each other learn to sandblast etched designs onto glass cups, make electronics or make homemade toys and devices. As a team, they were busy last week building a squid-themed bed for the Town of Lloyd’s SpringFest.

Squidwrench started with a dream Swehla brought back from California.

“I actually took a trip. I was in San Francisco for work, and I went to a place called Noisebridge. It’s a hackerspace, and it’s one of the ones that helped get the movement going — in the U.S. anyway. And I just crashed one of their monthly meetings, or weekly meetings, when I was out there. I met the founder Mitch Altman and just generally hung out with them,” Swehla said.

They had woodworking, metalworking, electronics, crafts, sewing and a slew of interdisciplinary projects going at once. Members were learning from each other. He met people from NASA and Google who had sought out Noisebridge for a place to work on side projects. They were friendly and encouraging.

“When I came back, I knew I needed a place like that here. We started out meeting at the Palace Diner and then Panera Bread — just wherever we could find space,” he explained. Since 2010, Squidwrench has met a lot in Dutchess County. But the dream was always to find some kind of permanent home.

Teresa Maranzano, 27, came to Squidwrench with art in mind. From Poughkeepsie, she graduated from Marywood University in Pennsylvania with an arts degree and now works as a barista in New Paltz. She admitted she had some hesitation about learning electronics and programming. At Squidwrench, they helped her with a toy she was building, adding lights and making it move. She fell down the rabbit hole and learned to program computers along the way.

“Now I can actually code things. It led to me doing Codeacademy. And a lot of people that we’ve had in other art organizations, in like Kingston and Poughkeepsie … we’ve been able to draw like minds in,” Maranzano said.

For the uninitiated, Codeacademy.com is a website dedicated to teaching people how to program in languages like Ruby, JavaScript and Python.

One benefit of meeting at Studio 81 has been the workspace and tools itself. It had a die-pressing machine, a vacuum former and soldering tools for building circuit boards.

“It’s come and share what you’ve got — ask the questions that you’ve got. Everybody brings something,” he said.

Squidwrench currently has between 20 and 35 active members, but on any given weekly Tuesday meeting night there might only be a dozen who show up to work on something. Membership in Squidwrench costs $25 a month, but Swehla encouraged people to show up to a meeting to see if they like what’s being offered before making a commitment.

“I want anybody who might be interested to have the idea that it’s here and come on out and join us. If it’s a fit, then it’s a fit,” he said.

To learn more about Squidwrench, search for them on Facebook, visit Squidwrench.org or www.meetup.com/squidwrench.

It’s not only for experts who want to share their technical knowledge of electronics or their artistic techniques. They also hold tutorials. Their “Intro to Electronics” lecture is aptly named “Why Isn’t This Blinking!?”

In the near future, there will be workshops on beer brewing, robot building, radio and hobby electronics, plus e-textiles and sewing for beginners.

A scavenger hunt to benefit the New Paltz United Teachers’ scholarship fund will be held on May 18 in New Paltz. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

The New Paltz United Teachers are hosting a Scavenger Hunt/Race this Saturday, May 18. The event will kick off at the New Paltz Middle School at 10 a.m. and end at Upstairs on 9 Café at the New Paltz Golf Course off Huguenot Street.

According to Meri Lederer, the race will consist of teams with two to four people “solving clues, finding objects, taking pictures, doing zany activities and having a great time throughout New Paltz!” The first-place team who scores the most points in the least amount of time will win the Grand Prize of $250.

The cost of entering the event is $30, which will yield a fun-filled afternoon as well as a tee-shirt and lunch at the Café. At least one member of the team will need to have a digital or cell-phone camera. Although kids can participate, each team, according to Lederer, must have at least one adult over the age of 18.

“This event is generously being sponsored by four local businesses,” she said, “including McGillicuddy’s, Main Street Bistro, P&G’s and the Law Offices of Robert F. Rich Jr.” All of the proceeds go to the New Paltz United Teachers’ Scholarship Fund, from which selected New Paltz High School graduates will receive an award in June.

To register, call Lederer at 256-4304 or e-mail her at merilederer@mac.com.

Elijah Santner. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Elijah Santner, 16, is spearheading a poetry gathering, workshop and open-mic session titled “Bridging the Gap” on Saturday, May 18 on the Springtown Road pedestrian bridge that spans the Wallkill River along the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail, as a fundraiser for the Hudson Valley Writers’ Project (HVWP) Young Writers’ Program. “I do a lot of my writing on that bridge,” said Santner, a 10th-grader at the Poughkeepsie Day School who recently was selected as Scholastic Magazine’s Writer of the Month for his Earth Day-inspired poem, “Dirt.”

“There are so many poets in this area, but I think too often we’re separated by age and generations,” said Santner, who works on the weekend at the Bakery in downtown New Paltz, which is owned by his father, David Santner. Bridging the Gap has a twofold meaning: one to bring poets of all ages together, and secondly to host a workshop/writing/open-mic session along a scenic linear public park.

To that end, Santner’s mother, Rebecca Burdett, a veteran elementary school teacher in the New Paltz Central School District, will be on hand to run a younger children’s poetry workshop. There will also be a Nature Poetry Workshop for poets of all ages led by Rich Parisio, New York State River of Words coordinator. “We will also have various word/writing props around the bridge to inspire writers, or simply have the beauty of the surroundings to let the words flow,” said the young poet.

The writing workshops will take place from 3 to 4 p.m. After that, Santner said, everyone is “encouraged to participate in an open-mic session from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. They can read what they wrote that day or bring something else to read.”

The aspiring young poet has already had success that many veteran poets would welcome. He submitted eight poems and two short stories to the Scholastic Youth Arts and Writing Contest and received two Golden Key awards, four Silvers and two Honorable Mentions. He explained that when the poems were being sent to the national contest, his work caught the eye of one of the judges. “I was invited to attend a writing program at Denison College,” and later, another judge asked him to submit a poem for Earth Day, which was “Dirt,” the featured poem of the month.

In terms of his poetry, Santner said that some of his strongest influences have been the Beat poets like Burroughs and Ginsberg and Kerouac, but added that some have described his poems as being “Whitmanesque…which is an outrageous compliment.”

He said that he was inspired to take a leadership role by organizing this poetry event after he had the privilege of being a presenter for the HVWP on “spoken-word poetry,” and also having had the opportunity to be a co-teacher for a poetry course at the Poughkeepsie Day School. “Whether 50 people turn out or five people turn out, my hope for this event is to inspire even one person to write poetry,” he said.

There is a rain date of Sunday, May 19, and the organizers will be asking for, but not requiring, a $5 donation towards the HVWP Young Writers’ Program. Parking is available at the Ulster BOCES parking lot off Route 32 near the Huguenot Street Rail Trail entrance, and handicapped parking is available on Coffey Lane. For more information, go to http://www.newpaltz.edu/hvwp/.

Wood anemone (photo by Richard Parisio)

What does one make of a hike that begins at a graveyard? Only that the human lives, and deaths, that transpired here cannot be disentangled from the life of the place we enjoy on a perfect spring day, with the forest awakening around us. The graveyard is a small family plot, surrounded by hand-laid stone walls, bearing witness to the tenure of the Enderly family, who homesteaded and farmed this rocky outpost along the banks of the Coxing Kill, where they operated a water-powered sawmill for a little more than a century, beginning in 1801. Starting at Mohonk Preserve’s Coxing Entry, I began and ended a recent walk there, on the High Peters Kill trail, passing through a forested landscape that yielded a stubborn living to generations of people before becoming a preserve for the wildlife it supports, and the hikers and rock climbers for whom it is now a refuge from the pressures of modern life.

Leaving the parking lot, and passing the Enderly burial plot, I noticed the fresh green of unfurling fern fiddleheads and a tapestry of club mosses, ground pine and cedar, springing up from the forest floor on either side of the trail, along with the leaves of Canada mayflower, glowing in the sunlight like green candle flames. This rich ground cover, composed largely of plants whose lineage stretches back to the tree fern forests of the Coal Age, is a sign that the forest is healing itself after many decades of hard and sometimes destructive use by humans. Farther along the trail enters a different kind of forest, dominated by dark green hemlocks, the descendants of giant hemlock trees that were felled here as in many other valleys of the Shawangunks and Catskills to supply the tanning industry that boomed in the 19th century. As is typical of hemlock forests, the dense shade that prevails here makes ground cover very sparse, providing little forage for wildlife, though I heard the song of a black-throated green warbler as I passed through. This yellow-cheeked warbler, with it’s “trees, trees, murmuring trees” song, is a bird I’ve come to associate with hemlock woods at this time of year.

I traversed the narrow plank boardwalk through a pocket wetland, crossed a brook on a newly constructed footbridge and followed the blue-blazed trail to an old woods road, Kings Lane, once used for hauling loads of conglomerate to be made into grindstones, that now serves as a path for rock climbers to reach the cliffs of “Lost City.” Here the High Peters Kill trail turns south, paralleling an old stone fence. I paused to admire the newly opened white blossoms of wood anemone, and the jewel-like fringed polygala, or “gaywings.” The latter, with its two flaring petals, surprised me with its intense burst of magenta among the brown oak leaves, looking like an impossibly colorful winged insect in flight. It seemed fitting that I heard my first wood thrush song of the season fluting from the woods beyond as I stooped to savor these exquisite flower-gems.

The trail began to climb, steadily at first, then more steeply, through mountain laurel thickets up a series of stone steps to the rock ledges of Dickie Barre, the ridge that forms part of the divide between the watersheds of the Coxing Kill and the Peters Kill. A side trail along the cliff edge opened out to a sweeping vista of the Trapps and Skytop. On top, surrounded by pitch pine barrens, with a dense growth of flowering blueberry, I began to get good view of the Catskills to the north and west. In places the bare rock ledges are polished smooth by glacial scouring, and bear marks of the last Ice Age, striations and crescent-shaped chatter marks. Here the traces of human industry seem to yield to the shaping of the land by primal elements, tectonic forces and the freezing and thawing of water over vast reaches of geologic time.

I was glad to descend from bright sun and bare rock to the cool hemlock shade of the Peters Kill, which cascaded in rapids and falls and gathered in tea-brown pools where the geometric shadows of water striders shadowed the bottom. My return route from the Peters Kill parking area of Minneswaska State Park was by way of the white-blazed Bull Wheel trail, beginning near the base of an old ski trail, and climbing up to a heath-like plateau where blueberry flower-bells dangled above reindeer lichen encrusting the bedrock outcrops, while brown rock tripe lichen stuccoes the boulders and cliff faces. The park has placed signs here advising hikers to stay on the trail, due to the ecologically sensitive nature of the terrain. Like the Enderlys and other early settlers in this area, the lichens that grow here are pioneers, the first to colonize the obdurate surface of bare conglomerate. These primitive plants, both fungus and algae, are symbols of life’s tenacity and toughness, growing where nothing else can. Yet their foothold is fragile as well, so we who pass among them must tread lightly and with care, or we risk scarring this land with our hiking boots as those who came before us did with their stone boats, grazing animals and crosscut saws.

Richard Parisio is a lifelong naturalist, educator and writer. He currently leads field trips for school classes at Mohonk Preserve, teaches courses about John Burroughs and conducts tours of Slabsides and the John Burroughs Sanctuary for groups and individuals by request. Rich is New York State coordinator for River of Words, a national poetry and art program on the theme of watersheds, and teaches River of Words programs for school classes, grades K-12, by request. Contact Rich (richparisio@gmail.com) with questions, comments, or suggestions for Nature at Your Doorstep.

Livia Vanaver. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Ever since she and her husband Bill Vanaver and their dance/music troupe the Vanaver Caravan moved from Queens to the Hudson Valley, Livia Drapkin Vanaver has become a renowned dancer/choreographer/educator here and abroad. Just this past week she was asked to choreograph a five-minute dance routine to the tune “I Love New York,” which more than 1,000 people would do at the same time along the 1.2-mile Walkway Over the Hudson in an attempt to break a world record.

“I had to make the steps simple, so that dancers and non-dancers and people of all ages could do them,” said Livia. “It wasn’t my greatest piece of choreography, but it was for a community fundraiser; and being a choreographer also means being able to orchestrate something that someone needs you to do, and that was a lot of fun!”

The Vanaver Caravan Dancers and Musicians recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of the troupe’s first performance at the Washington Square Methodist Church in the West Village in 1972. Two years later, they moved to the Hudson Valley and grew into a touring company of dancers and musicians that presents a variety of entertaining and informative programs that synthesize various ethnic and regional styles ranging from Appalachian clogging to flamenco, complemented by a range of modern techniques. To learn more about their performances, programs and camps, go to http://vanavercaravan.org/home.

Livia is known not only for her energy and enthusiasm, but also for her professional breadth of knowledge and experience in international dance, song and music, as well as being an educator and choreographer. Part of the great tapestry of the Hudson Valley, she is the subject of this week’s New Paltz Times Meet & Greet.

Business:
The Vanaver Caravan Dancers and Musicians

Occupation:
Choreographer/educator, co-founder and artistic director of the Vanaver Caravan

Where are you from originally?
Queens

What makes the New Paltz/Rosendale region unique?
First of all, it is so beautiful here! It is breathtakingly beautiful. There is also a vibrant energy here that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world.

What do you like about the Rosendale community?
I love the people here. There is such a strong sense of community in Rosendale. We do a lot together, especially centered around the Rosendale Theatre. We get things done and care for each other. I guess there’s just such a sense of hope and of endless possibilities in this area. When you see what’s going on in the world around us, I feel that I’m blessed to live in a place where there is still such hope and belief in the future.

Perry Goldschein of the Hudson Valley Wine Market will celebrate his grand opening on Saturday, May 11 from 1 to 4 p.m. at 119 Main Street in Gardiner. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

Hudson Valley Wine Market on Main Street in Gardiner has the greatest inventory of homegrown Hudson Valley wines of any wine boutique. Owner Perry Goldschein, who purchased the business (formerly known as Enthusiastic Spirits) in January of 2013 from town supervisor Carl Zatz, said that he has “always enjoyed good wine.” But it was when he lived in the Napa Valley region in northern California for several years in the 1990s that he fell “in love with wine-tasting and the wine tourism there.”

When he moved back, he tried to sample some of the local wines where he grew up in New Jersey and then in Virginia. “They just didn’t taste good.” When he and his family moved to Gardiner several years ago and he went to visit many of the vineyards, he said, he was “pleasantly surprised by how far the Hudson Valley wineries had come, how good their wines were and how little people seemed to know about them and their amazing quality.”

After educating himself more on the variety of Hudson Valley wines, styles of winemaking and the rules and regulations of the New York State Liquor Authority, he decided to purchase the existing wine store in a renovated Colonial home in the hamlet of Gardiner and put an emphasis on selling and promoting Hudson Valley wines. “We do have a great selection of wines from all over the world, but our highest percentage of inventory is of Hudson Valley wines,” he said.

As he continues to stock more and more local wines, some of the many best-sellers thus far include Whitecliff’s Awosting White, as well as the vineyard’s Pinot Noir. “They’re very popular,” he said. The Warwick Valley Black Dirty Red, a Baco Noir, has also been a hit, along with Millbrook Chardonnay and the Riesling produced by Brotherhood out of Washingtonville.

Asked if there was a signature grape or style of winemaking in the Hudson Valley region, Goldschein said, “Not yet. I think it’s still too new. The Finger Lakes region in New York, for example, has really made a name for itself with Rieslings. The Hudson Valley also makes some wonderful Rieslings. But if I could think of one thing that sets this region’s wines apart, it’s the amount of expert winemakers. They know how to make great wine, and understand what grapes will work in this cooler region.”

Because he has visited so many of the wineries and spent a lot of time learning about the various grapes and hybrid wines and the winemaking process that is unique to each winery or vineyard, he feels that he can talk “about Hudson Valley wines with customers with a lot of knowledge and greater understanding of how they’re made, what food to pair them with, what a customer likes and which wine would best suit their palate.”

Goldschein said that since he took ownership of the wine store and turned it into the Hudson Valley Wine Market, he has been amazed by “how friendly everyone is. Our customers are lovely. Many of them were customers of the previous store and live right here in Gardiner or come from the surrounding townships like New Paltz and Wallkill. Then we have a nice base of tourists who come in and appreciate the Hudson Valley wines, want to learn more about them. So it’s been wonderful.”

Besides the local wines, he also sells the über-popular Tuthilltown Spirits whiskeys and then has some select and eclectic wines from around the world. There are organic wines, as well as champagne, California wines and a nice selection of spirits.

“We’re getting more wines in every week, and now that we have some more shelving, we have the room to display them,” he said. “I loved the look and cozy feel of the store and didn’t want to change it too much. It fits the building, the style of our business, the small-town atmosphere with both a local and worldly selection.”

Wine-lovers can enjoy a variety of tastings and meet local winery-owners in person at the store’s Grand Opening on Saturday, May 11 from 1 to 4 p.m. at 119 Main Street. To learn more about the store, you can call 255-0600 or visit the website where Goldschein will be selling Hudson Valley wines via e-commerce at http://hudsonvalleywinemarket.com.

Leo and Rebecca Glaser of Angels ‘n Earth. (photo by Lauren Thomas)

For Rebecca Glaser planting flowers and landscaping around the gravesites of relatives has been a family tradition. “I would say the idea was instilled by my parents, because every year my parents would plant flowers at their family members’ sites over in Poughkeepsie,” Rebecca said. “I took somewhat of a backseat to that initially. I would just help them out or see what they were doing.”

When she lost her father in 2005, she took over the plantings for her mom to uphold the tradition.

“I said we’ll do it — Leo and I will do it. So we stepped up and did the plantings at this one particular cemetery,” she said.

Rebecca and Leo Glaser ended up spending a lot of time at the graveyard working on plantings at three different graves for people in their family.

“One day I was just over there watering the plants, and I saw other people who had come and tried to plant flowers. A week later the flowers were dead, or this and that. So I just thought, you know this is really important,” she said. “Not everybody has that need to go to a site … So I just thought it’d be really nice to provide that service to people who weren’t able to do it.”

Leo and Rebecca, of Gardiner, are both educators with the summers off. So they took to the plantings as a summer job with their new company Angels ’n Earth.

There was some research to do. Cemeteries are usually run by non-profit boards. They have rules about what can or can’t be planted as a memorial. The Glasers do their plantings in raised bed boxes, using only annuals — not perennials.

“It was a little bit of a process to get people to accept what we did, because at first people were a little resistant. I think they thought we were just going to come in and make more of a mess,” Leo said. “So our niche is to actually just plant annuals. We go in at the end of May. We tend the beds through September.”

Angels ’n Earth offers gravestone cleaning as well, but they also give discounts to families or friends who’d like multiple grave plots landscaped.

You can find out more about what they offer by looking online at www.angelsnearth.com or by calling (914) 456-2368.