Yorktown Heights New York

There aren't many people who drove from New York 45miles on ice and snow to their job across the Tappan Zee Bridge into New Jersey. It's usually the other way around. I loved Westchester county and the 14 roomed two hundred year old Colonial house George lived in.I also fell in love with his daughter, Johanna
George and I were both going through divorces and we liked the same things. It was hard to weather the two year battle he had in court for shared custody of his daughter. We spent a lot of time in the big drafty kitchen freezing next to the smokey old, leaking wood stove. So much for the fourteen rooms, we stayed in one room most of the year on the "economy plan" of the local oil company who charged $400./mth all year for no heat.
We also spent time at his mother Dorothy's house in Pawling, NY..I brought some slides in to develop and the clerk asked me if we were fixing the place up and I had to say, no. My art studio had bats behind the pictures hanging on the wall so I moved very cautiously in there. George told me how he and his sister Susan used to catch the bats with sheets as a game; one I never wanted to try.
We would go on long walks in the 275 acre "farm"squeezed to darkness by overgrown trees. Once walked the property line with James Earl Jones who had build a brick mansion surrounded by Dobermans on George's land according to the survey he had done with 84yrs old Dorothy. I heard George say looking at the deeded land Jones had I think there is a property like that three miles down the road. Went back to Hawaii before that was resolved.
Left Johanna my tv with a lipstick message, "I love you." And I did, when I was in counseling in Honolulu it wasn't just George I missed, I missed his daughter too.