Which movie is that?

In the Gloaming.  I saw this film in 1997.  It was a New Yorker short story turned into a film directed by Christopher Reeve and is about a young man with AIDS who comes home from Manhattan to die.  That home is in Pound Ridge, New York.

I was in the midst of dissolving my first marriage.  I had moved back to the U.S. and was deciding where I should go next to start a new life.  East coast?  West coast?  Japan?  It all seemed so disorienting and frightening at the time.  A wellspring of emotions.

Curled up on the sofa, I happened to catch this film on HBO and stayed with the story.  It is a family drama with intricate emotions.

The lovely setting struck me.  The autumn and winter shots were gorgeous. Trees and ponds and white clapboard houses.  Who is lucky enough to live there? I wondered.  Nowhere in the movie do they mention the town name, so I waited for the final credits to roll so I could see where the movie was shot.  When I saw it was Pound Ridge, I pulled out a map to locate it.  I knew nothing of Westchester County, nor that picturesque, leafy small towns could be so close to New York City.  I’m not originally from the east coast, so how would I know?

I’d like to live in a place like Pound Ridge!   That is what I was thinking then.  I pictured a different lifestyle than what I had while living abroad in crowded, noisy cities where maple, oak, elm, and sycamore trees were few and far between –  if they existed at all.  I wanted a town with clean air and open space.  A place to drop my bags and settle in, take comfort from the nature just outside my door.  But not be so remote, either.  I was ready for that.  Yes sir.

Did I go directly to Pound Ridge?

No.  It took me several years.  Five to be exact.  My peripatetic life took me to San Francisco, then Tampa, then Ithaca, then Saratoga Springs, NY.

It took meeting Dearest Beloved, a 20+ years Pound Ridge resident, to get me here.  That is a story for another time.  You’ll have to come back for that.

Yes, the town – and its hamlets – are lovely, just like in the movie.  And years later, my own stepfamily drama with intricate emotions is what brings my story to you, live from Pound Ridge.