MT Rainey is at Troutbeck, Amenia, NY, United States — Early Spring at Troutbeck, the idyllic retreat for naturalists, humanists, thinkers and poets. A bit like Charleston was for the Bloomsbury set but without a similarly charismatic doyenne. Host to Emerson, Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, Sinclair Lewis, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Teddy Roosevelt. All the boys. Presumably not all at the same time. Now it’s an “activated farmhouse” where you can think, read, wander and wonder what’s up with the world that only a hundred years ago was so full of progress and promise. Meanwhile the snowdrops, bluebells and daffodils are starting to pop out. As yet undefeated. “The earth laughs in flowers”, Ralph Waldo Emerson.