Carole Osterink's relationship with the city of Hudson is truly a love story. Inspired by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the The Gossips of Rivertown blogger came to Hudson Valley to escape city life and hunker down with her writing. However, things changed when she visited Hudson and immediately become enchanted with the city's architecture and unique spirit, which she says made her feel like could slip into an earlier time. Twenty years later as a full-time resident, she's still in the honeymoon phase. I visited Hudson for the first time ever back in 1991 and fell hopelessly in love. I had recently left a job in publishing and had settled in a little rented house in Red Hook, intending to live a quiet life in the country and write. I remember wandering along Warren Street on that first visit, awestruck by the architecture. Those were the very early days of Hudson’s renaissance, and I found everything I saw astonishing, confusing and enticing. Two years and many visits later, I bought a house in Hudson and left the rented house on the country road to live in the only city on the east side of the Hudson between Poughkeepsie and Albany. I certainly didn’t come to Hudson with an exit strategy, but I somehow never imagined that this would be the only place I would ever want to live. I grew up in Michigan, spent the first two decades of my adult life in Manhattan, and here and there along the way lived in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas and Florida, but after all that, this place was “just right." I love being surrounded by the vistas that inspired the Hudson River School painters. I love living in a place that is very urban — “Upstate’s Downtown" as it’s called these days — yet surrounded by working farms producing quality food sustainably and humanely. The foodie in me revels in this time of year; with two farmers’ markets now in Hudson it’s a locavore’s delight. I also never imagined that I would become involved in local politics, but I did. So now I’m combining decades of making a living as a writer with my experience advocating for historic preservation, exploring Hudson history, serving as an alderman, and observing the political machinations of Hudson to write The Gossips of Rivertown, a blog of local news, commentary, and history. Hudson is endlessly intriguing — its past and its present — and it is pure joy to write about what I know and what I am constantly learning about this fascinating and quirky place.
