Almeda and Hilda Senecal bought the house, continuing the postal service, in 1947. The new plan is a temporary move to squash us into the Keene Post Office. We hope the move will be temporary anyway.

Yesterday I was out in my front yard, which faces

state Route 73 — this is Main Street in Keene and Keene Valley–planting bulbs. I didn’t get too much accomplished, though, because people, both on foot and in their cars, kept stopping to talk to me about the closing of the post office.

Nobody likes it. There is a white board at Valley Grocery where people can take a felt-tip marker and write a message wishing the old PO adieu, and expressing the hope that we will soon get another KV site.

I asked Ginny Bushey what she thought about the whole uproar.

“Isn’t it something?” She said. “But I go to the senior center in Keene three times a week anyway, so I’ll just stop at the post office then.”

We’ll probably all just get used to the change, although I don’t much care for the idea. That’s the way with these things.

For example, right now it appears that cluster fly season has begun. I have never encountered cluster flies anywhere else but here in the Adirondacks. They resemble common houseflies in appearance, but have very different personalities.

The housefly has a type A personality. He is wired and, despite his disgusting proclivity for garbage and excrement, seems almost intelligent. It is almost impossible to catch a housefly, no matter how stealthy you are. He can zoom around the room at top speeds, intermittently landing on your face or your plate of spaghetti.

Clusterflies are so slow they hardly seem alive, but then they never seem to actually die, either.

How do I know it’s clusterfly season? About a million cluster flies are droning around on the window sill trying to climb up the glass, from whence they will fall onto your head or onto the floor, where left undisturbed, they they will languish for days on end, slowly rotating on their backs and feebly waving their little legs.

Then, one day, cluster fly season is over, the irritant is gone, and you hardly even notice.

Shouldn’t you be grateful when the last clusterfly is just a tiny dried up husk found at the bottom of an envelope box or behind the bookcase when you sweep?

I mean, here is one clusterfly exoskeleton in the corner of a box as opposed to a plague of living, buzzing clusterflies crawling over your window treatments on sunny November days and littering your floor and clogging up your Dust

Buster.

Yet I guarantee that this year, as in years past, clusterfly season will fade away with hardly a comment from anyone.

This is because as soon as one problem is solved or is successfully evaded or simply disappears, another is right there to take its place and claim your attention.

You don’t have time to celebrate.

In the words of a Texas oil man I once knew, “If it’s not one thing, it’s sumpum.” Which is true.

Once, inspired by a 1988 Volkswagon Fox I — often, for reasons for its own, it would simply stop wherever it happened to find itself and refuse to go another inch, as if it had fallen into a trance state — I came up with a great idea for a radio talk show. It was to be called “You Think YOU Got Problems!” The show wouldn’t be limited to cars. Anyone could call in and complain about anything at all, in a competitive way.

One caller might start off telling how impossible it is to ever settle anything with the Verizon Telephone Company, for example. The next caller would yell “That’s nothing!” and launch into his complaint, which could be about the IRS or aliens or raccoons or clusterflies. Anything.

The talk show host would say things like “Oh yeah?” or “Been there,” or, if he wanted to get things fired up he could ask “So what?” or “your point being?”

I still think it’s a pretty good idea.

Have a good week.