Ecoduction

The Hudson Valley is the larger area in which I find myself these days. With a bit of a closer lens I would say that Kingston is my home. Kingston, in the mid Hudson Valley, right along the river, just below Saugerties and just above Poughkeepsie. Kingston has no train station and one bus stop. For many years, Kingston was not the city of tourist choice in the Valley, mostly because we were surrounded by more “interesting” towns like Woodstock, Newpaltz, Hudson and Beacon. Kingston for a long time was an IBM town with most of the employment coming from them, but when IBM pulled out of Kingston and took all the jobs with them the town crashed.Since then Kingston has found incredible resilience in its people, and that version of Kingston is really appealing.

My first home in the Hudson Valley was in Accord, in a small one bedroom cottage which I shared with my mother. The name of the road was Bone Hollow and it was up in the woods for sure. I didn’t always love living there though it did have its perks. My time was most well invested when I was in kingston with my Father, I was around Thirteen when my love for uptown Kingston took off. I moved to Kingston soon after that, and little by little and quicker and quicker my connection to the already alive community turned into full blown participation.Participation in the form of farmers markets, summer camps, walking anywhere with my dad, a festival, and School. With each passing year this participation became more independent, self directed and came with a lot more responsibility, but I never shied away from it. As I got older I started to see things about kingston that I didn’t love so much. Sudden gentrification, systemic racism in the education programs, the way Kingston was mostly liberal but all of our immediate neighbors such as Saugerties, Stoneridge, Accord, Etc are very right republicans. I saw my role as well as the roles of all the people and organizations that I respected in all of these things, but none of those things made my roots shrivel at all. I know Kingston has a hold on me in a way that no other place ever has because I feel everything that happens there inside me. every time a big storm comes that looks like it might knock me over I just dig my roots in deeper and I always find a network ready to hold me in place as I hold it. I know Kingston is my place because I don’t want to leave.