Birchez Associates LLC

When it comes to sewing, Indiana-native Bobby Taylor has plenty of experience.  Having once run her own handmade doll company — called, appropriately, Taylor Made — these days Bobby is lending her skills to the Residents’ Club at The Birches at Esopus, where she’s lived for the past year.  In addition to serving as the club’s treasurer, she creates table covers for the community room where the club meets, and her current project is to sew grocery tote bags for her fellow residents.

“I’m making tote bags, and what I’m trying to do is make it so that everybody here can have at least one grocery tote,” she says.  “I gave one to each of the other three officers in the club, and they say it works great, and holds a lot of stuff. That’ll be my project for the next business meeting, and I hope to have one for everyone that wants one.”

However, it’s not just her sewing skills that she brings to bear in the club.  Her position as treasurer is well deserved: “I have the background for it.  I spent forty years working with big budgets and money and stuff.” Bobby got her start with budgets when she got her first big job, working for the Sansabelt Slacks Company.

“When I started there, I didn’t know what an invoice was,” she says.  “When I left, I was in charge of my own department.”

While sewing and keeping track of the residents’ club’s finances, Bobby has taken note of the benefits her home in The Birches at Esopus, which she shares with her husband George and their daughter, Nikki, who acts as their caretaker.

“Oh, the building is so nice,” she says.  “We don’t have to go outside for anything except to buy food.  You don’t have to schlep through snow and ice to get rid of your garbage or pick up the mail.  You don’t have to carry laundry baskets next door or anything.  It’s very nice to have it accessible.”

Brian Rubin for Birchez Associates, birchezassociates@gmail.com