A Message to Our Community
Brenda Gilhooly: A FAMILY
ENRICHED BY ORANGE
COUNTY
It was
only supposed to have been one year.
That was
the plan, anyway. I was leaving my beloved hometown of Annapolis , Md., with its abundant charms: Chesapeake Bay, the
Naval Academy,
cutesy downtown boutiques filled with preppy Pappagallo prints, and Old
Bay-laced crabs that torch your tongue.
I wanted
to get experience on a daily newspaper, and the Times
Herald-Record offered me a job.
The plan:
Get one year of daily experience, then return to Maryland.
My
husband and I got a small apartment in Middletown,
just for the year. Six months later, though, I was promoted and decided to give
my job some more time. As the years went by, I discovered that not only was I
getting more invested in my job, but also with life in Orange County.
We had our daughter, then our son, and moved into a 1941 home on a tree-lined
street where our neighbors wave as they jog, bicycle or walk their dogs past
our front porch.
Our
family happily got into the rhythms of life in Orange County.
West Point,
with its stony gray authority, is far more severe than Annapolis’
red-bricked Naval Academy, but what better way to spend a summer
evening than at Trophy Point, overlooking the Hudson River? The little shops
in Annapolis were charming, but so were the
shops that Sugar Loaf and Warwick had to offer – and they are way less
touristy. The children grew up climbing on the mock trains at Orange County Park and enjoying family
bike rides on the Heritage Trail, autumn
brunches at Bear Mountain, sledding at Maple Hill Park, summer ice-cream nights at Blueberry Mountain,
concerts at Middletown’s
Festival Square
and community theater at Museum
Village.
Twenty-eight
years later, we’re still here. This is where we have chosen to stay, not
because we were born here, but because for our family, it’s home.
This all
makes it even more exciting as I take over as editor of Orange
magazine.
Even
after all these years, I don’t pretend to know it all about the people and places
in Orange County, but I welcome your ideas and
feedback. Please contact me at 346-3121, or by e-mail at bgilhooly@OrangeMagazineNY.com with your story
suggestions and comments about the magazine.
