JUNE -- Heaven and Hell (or damn close by)

Colorado Columbines appeared very early this year

After anticipating our second summer at the cabin since, well, since leaving last summer, it was heaven to finally hit the road and return to our “other” home.  It was a joyful second home-coming, returning to a finished, furnished, and equipped cabin (unlike the first year) where all we had to do was to move in our provisions and settle in for the next four months.  

Lemon glazed vegan gems

Batty for bat boxes (the first of eight)

We were quick to renew old routines and start this year’s special projects, hiking almost daily, fires in the wood-burning stove to take the morning chill off the cabin, catching up with our Colorado friends, tending to the forest, and for Bob, constructing the first of many bat boxes.  There were cookies to bake and the local libraries to visit, and gatherings with friends and family, impromptu or otherwise.  Mountain life is good.

Salads, not soups, as the temps rise

The hummingbirds, mostly Broad Tails, are drinking the quart feeder dry twice a day.  If they run out they fly up to us and hover less than a foot from our faces, essentially ORDERING us to provide a refill, FAST!  Since we no longer seed feed (too much of a bear attractant) we have to work at birding a bit more than we’re used to, but we are enjoying the local birds which are quite varied and interesting even though it is harder to pick them out in the forest than perched on a saguaro.  We enjoy the gyrations of the turkey vultures pivoting in the updrafts in the valley off our front porch.  Chickadees hang upside down on the aspen branches, checking for insects.  Nuthatches walk headfirst down tree trunks communicating to each other with their weird muted nasal calls.  A Townsend’s Solitare sits on a tall snag at the top of our hill every evening at sunset to serenade us with its lovely and varied song.  We’ve had two bears -- that we know of -- outside the cabin...one looks to be the same one from last year, only bigger and with an more beautiful cinnamon coat, and one a small yearling, about the size of an English sheepdog.  I’ve been working with the Bear Aware program here, helping to educate humans about living in bear country.  

Movie night, outside

Despite our elevation of 8,600 feet, we are not exempt from global warming trends.  We’ve had some very warm weather for here -- not as hot as the 109 degree day I spotted on the Tucson weather forecast, but we’ve now had a few afternoons in the low 90’s...nothing to complain about so long as you find a shady spot to share with a cool drink and a good book.  Even here I am at times reluctant to turn on the oven to roast some veggies or tofu or bake cookies.  Last night we decided to watch a DVD outside, instead of in the warmish cabin.  We put the laptop on our little bistro table and us in comfy camp chairs, and watched Sideways (again) with our towering red rocks adjacent to the cabin as a dramatic backdrop -- sort of like a drive-in movie in a dramatic location sans the big screen and the car.  

The heat has had other consequences, aside from lots of salads.  The forest is dry and getting drier by the day.  Wildflowers that were in such early profusion when we arrived a month ago are shriveling now, the scant tenth of an inch of rain we’ve recorded in the past month not enough to sustain their enthusiastic spring growth.  Dry warm air, wind, and a crunchy forest are not a good combination and Colorado is battling several wildfires, a few of them big ones.  We are particularly sensitive to forest fires as this new cabin stands where the original cabin stood for 40 years before burning in the Hayman fire ten years ago.  

The Waldo Fire, two hours old,
viewed from near the cabin

We’ve seen at least half a dozen smoke plumes from fires as near as ten miles away and have been enlisted by the local volunteer fire-fighting force, the Mountain Communities Fire Protection District, as we have an excellent long view from the southeast to the north.  We followed our tireless neighbor Todd -- site manager of the adjacent retreat, father of three (soon to be four), EMT and chief firefighter of our local station -- through locked gates in the back country to last week’s meeting at the firehouse where we filled out volunteer applications.  Before the meeting could start the volunteer firefighters were called out to battle a few of seven manmade fires set in two hours by an arsonist.  It’s one thing to have dry lightning start a fire in a tinder dry forest.  It’s harder to understand someone who’s either clueless or feels that the fire ban doesn’t apply to him.  But someone deliberately setting fires, multiple fires (over two dozen so far)!!!???  Utterly mind-boggling.  Cabins can be rebuilt, but forests could take a thousand years to return to their current maturity.  

The last few weeks have been tough.  Rumors of nearby fires have abounded, some true (and quickly extinguished), and some simply rumors.  We’ve had days choked with the smoke of fires near and far.  The Springer fire between Florissant and Lake George was scary enough, but was soon overshadowed in a huge way by the Waldo Fire on the western edge of Colorado Springs.  

The view from Divide, eight miles west
after being evacuated from Woodland Park,
five days into the Waldo Fire.  Grim.

 Finally I packed us an evacuation bag of a few changes of clothes, things for the dog, important papers and our laptop, binoculars, and cameras just in case we find ourselves in the line of a wildfire and are ordered to get out quickly.  I was glad I had when the Waldo fire blew up the day we were in Woodland Park trying to reprovision.  We could see a thin column of black smoke near the Ute Pass (Hwy 24) driving into town and by the time we’d gotten the bulk of the grocery shopping done it was churning.  We tried to stop at our favorite Asian restaurant only to be told it was under mandatory evacuation.  Suddenly I wasn’t so hungry.  We tried one more shop on the west end of Woodland Park but it was the same story.  Heading 8 miles further west to Divide, I popped into the the smallish grocery to get a few things missing from my shopping list, and in the ten minutes it took me to get out it now looked like Mount Vesuvius was erupting just down the road.  Lunch and the Florissant library evaporated from out to do list and all we wanted to do was get back to the cabin.  A neighbor called saying she’d gotten a reverse 911 call that she didn’t hear all of, but the word evacuation had been used.  I called the sheriff and was told that we were on pre-evacuation and to get ready to leave and wait for word.  This later turned out to be an error on the Sheriff’s department end, but it did tend to focus the mind.  Waldo now seems to be pretty well contained, but we are aware that until we get a good dose of soaking rain we are in a Red Zone fire area.  Forest fires have always been part of life in these mountains, but never has it been so pervasive.

Never too early to indoctrinate the youngest member of the tribe
into the Healthy Forest Initiative tools of the trade

Still, we are grateful to be able to be in our mountain cabin enjoying the relatively cooler weather, our local friends, and visits from Colorado family.  This montane environment is so very different from that other landscape we also love, the desert southwest.  Both places wait for the summer monsoon with its quenching rains, and it cannot come soon enough.

The Christmas Diaries, Part 6

Winter Wonderland, December 22nd 

No other name could apply.  We were living inside a snow globe.

It was still snowing at dawn and we had seven inches on flat surfaces around the cabin that had been cleared the day before.  It was 11 degrees, which sounds cold, and is, but so much better than the minus 13 we’d experienced last year.  We layered up, put the coat on the dog, and went outside to clear the decks and shovel a few paths around the cabin.  Bump went charging off down the drive, coming to an abrupt stop when the shoveled path ended and she met a near two foot wall of snow.  

Flocked with the real stuff

The birds were busy at the feeders, flitting around the deck chairs, sheltering underneath them.  One of them caught my eye...it looked familiar, but different somehow.  Our regular Gray-headed Junco had been joined by two other juncos, the Slate-colored Dark-eyed Junco and the White-winged Junco, neither of which I’d seen before.  A Junco Trifecta!  

Near the fire, a Kindle on your lap, a dog at your feet
and a snow-covered landscape outside...bliss!

It was a perfect day to stay inside near the fire, read, and watch the snow drift down.  The loft, always cosy and warm, had a puzzle of Colorado landmarks to be finished, and Bob was up to the task.  By sunset, shortly after 4 PM, the snow had stopped and it’s blanketing whiteness was as unmarred as it would be.  We counted ourselves lucky to have gotten a good snowstorm two years running, at least until we thought about how we’d get the car down the drive.  Oh well, we’ll worry about that some other day.

The Christmas Diaries, Part 4

Snowy dawn

Ten Years Ago Today, December 20th

Dawn brought a winter wonderland scene of snow-flocked evergreens and a cloudless sky.  Sometime in the night it had actually warmed up to 16 degrees - a heat wave.  It was clear that at least another inch of snow had fallen during the night, bringing the total  to three or four inches over 24 hours.  There is nothing quite so lovely as a blanket of freshly fallen snow, sparkling in the sun.  It made me think of this same day, ten years ago, the day I arrived in Tucson to take up residence.  This is at odd place to be on that anniversary, at a high elevation cabin in the Colorado Rockies surrounded by snow, but there is a connection.  I’m here with the man, now my husband, who was my neighbor and the first person I met in Tucson, ten years ago today.  As they say, nowhere in my wildest dreams...

Arrival in Tucson, December 20th, 2001

Our cabin retreat, December 20th, 2011

At mid-morning we heard some sort of vehicle, the first we’d heard since our arrival.  We got out the front door just in time to see our neighbor, the site manager of the adjacent retreat, heading back down our drive plowing our road.  This is one of those things I so love about being here at the cabin and in such a remote location.  Neighbors are much more likely to lend a hand, and to do it without being asked or negotiation.  And it all works out.  My husband has helped this neighbor by teaching a few units of science to his home schooled kids, and I’ve baked the cookies that are the post-lesson treats.  We help other neighbors move wood and get hand carved bears in return.  Baked goods change hands, and there’s always a hot cup of tea or cold beer for anyone dropping by.  

Icing

By noon the temperature was just above freezing so we put on a few layers, boots and hats, got the coat on Bump and headed out for a walk.  With the long driveway cleared walking was easy and pleasant, and it felt good to move after being two days in the car and a snowy day inside the cabin.  We headed down the road enjoying our frisky dog’s antics and the warm sun on our backs.  Last summer’s fields of wildflowers were now carpeted in smooth snow, unmarked except for the occasional string of wildlife tracks.  Caps of snow helped define the rocky outcrops.  You could hear the creek gurgling under it’s iced-over top.  

Back at home after an easy two mile ramble it was, at 36 degrees, way too nice to go inside.  We decided to hang our one string of outdoor colored Christmas lights, and made a quick job of it, and still didn’t want to go inside.  I have little experience with snow aside from living in Michigan until I was nine years old, so I am alway surprised how sitting in a sheltered sunny spot in a snowy, near-freezing landscape can be so blissful.  Our south-facing porch is just such a spot on a calm day.  With the afternoon sun low in the sky we sat in sweaters on the Adirondack chairs, basking like lizards, soaking in the sun and were totally comfortable.  Even our once snow-phobic dog settled down in four inches of it just off the deck, laying in the sun.  But the minute the sun got near to setting behind the mountain across the valley, the sun’s rays diffusing through the tops of the pines and firs, we began to feel the chill.

A vegan dinner, the better to have more anniversaries

Retreating inside on this last day of fall, celebrating my arrival in Tucson and our first meeting, we made a dinner of roasted portobello mushrooms stuffed with a savory mix of brown rice, lentils, and cashews mixed with fresh parley and lemon thyme I’d harvested from our Tucson herb garden, and braised brussel sprouts.  We poured some wine and reminisced about the crazy set of circumstances that brought and kept us together.  Neither one of us could have imagined anything more unlikely, or so right.  It almost makes you believe in fate.  We count ourselves very, very lucky.

The Christmas Diaries, Part 2

Last year's raspberries casting their late afternoon shadows on the snow

Arrival...Sunday, December 18th

We did our typical trying-to-get-somewhere early morning wake-up at the motel, checked in with each other -- “Are you going back to sleep?  Me neither. Let’s go.” -- and were on the road by 5 AM.  We gassed up at Circle K, got coffees, and dug into our friend Geri’s Christmas present of zucchini bread before we’d hit I-25 North.  In the pre-dawn we congratulated ourselves on missing the blizzard that was coming through this area this evening, a blizzard that would, in fact, eventually close Raton Pass, our passage into Colorado.  At first light you could see the snow-chalked ground below the pinon pines and juniper, the white horizontal striping of the mesa ledges.  With some Windham Hill Christmas music collections playing, we watched it get light, enchanted with the snowy scene.  Our excitement mounted with every passing mile.

After a quick stop at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Woodland Park, The May Flower, we went on to Florissant, turned north, and soon hit dirt roads.  They were a bit snow-packed in places, so it was a slow trip in, but beautiful.  It felt like we’d been away for a few days instead of 10 weeks.  When we’d left in early October our neighbor had been fly fishing on the lake below the cabin; now they were ice fishing (and had a beautiful big rainbow trout to show for it) and ice skating through the powder that had fallen over the frozen lake.  

It was all good until we hit our driveway, much of it covered in nearly a foot of snow.  Someone, thank goodness, had driven up fairly recently, so we had their tracks to help navigate the steep, near quarter mile to the cabin.  We made a few runs at it, having to back up a time or two to get further along the unplowed drive.  When the cabin was in sight we decided to leave the car for a bit and hike on up through the snow, anxious to make sure the cabin was alright and that we had power and heat and no frozen pipes.  It proved to be in fine and welcoming shape, relatively warm inside (mid-50’s) thanks in part to the low angle of the sun flooding the cabin with light and the propane heater set to low just to keep the cabin, and its pipes, safe.  

It was great to arrive at a cabin that was fully ready to be occupied.  Both last Christmas and last summer we had either no, or not enough, furniture and there was much moving in and organizing to do.  This time it was turn-key ready, or as turn-key as a cabin like this can be.  We got all the power on, went down in the crawl space and turned on the well pump, checked for leaks, and got a fire going in the wood-burning stove.  My husband went back down the hill and finally managed to get the car up the drive (next time the chains will be put on before trying), and unloaded.  There was a ton of stuff to put away, fire-wood to be hauled up, and totes and duffles to be stowed, but we found time to sit for a short time on the front deck, a bit of a heat trap, where it was, oddly, sweater weather.  It was a mild day with a high in the low 40’s, and we knew the next day would be different, with a predicted high in the 20’s and a few inches of snow.  Perfect!

After an early dinner of some chili I’d made in Tucson and brought up in our cooler, we were in bed by 8 PM -- not so surprising when it gets dark at 5 PM -- and we slept the deep sleep of arriving home after a 900 mile journey.

Mid-Summer

This juvenile Great Blue Heron posed for me at Deer Lake, below the cabin

Life at the cabin just keeps rolling along in the most pleasant of ways.  With the major essential projects behind us we are settling into what I’m thinking passes for normal up here -- days filled with reading, nature watching, hiking, cooking and eating, cabin and forest maintenance, gardening, visiting with neighbors, and stargazing.  We know the world will keep spinning on its axis without our following the debt-ceiling crisis and the early throes of the next election cycle, and we’re happier for shrugging that off for now.

Deer's breakfast just off the front deck

Instead we wake up to deer munching baby aspens in our front yard, and are often still sipping coffee at 10 AM while reading the novel of the moment until our tummies insist on breakfast.  The next order of business is often a hike before it gets too warm (low 80’s) or the afternoon thunderstorms start up.  We had over three inches of much needed rain in July (on top of about an inch in June), one inch of it in about 20 minutes, complete with BB-sized hail!  Usually it falls much slower, soaking into the forest floor instead of washing out our driveway.

Our hikes are filled with change and new discoveries each and every time.  As the seasons roll on some wildflowers finish while others are just reaching maturity.  It seems to be the start of the harvest season for the critters -- the raspberries are ripening (and make a refreshing snack along the trail), some flowers going to seed while others are brim full with nectar.  Most of our hikes are along creeks and our dog Bump does her best to take advantage of them to keep cool and hydrated.

HUGE bumblebee having its way with a thistle

We put in a border garden on the entry side of the cabin.  I bought a few perennials grown here in Colorado, blue penstemons, cone flowers, and hyssop.  But mostly I’ve collected wildflowers from the forest (careful to harvest them only where they exist in great numbers) -- scarlet gillia, wild rose, mountain laurel, wild geranium, black-eyed Susans, pussy toes, harebells, and lavender asters to name a few.  

Installing a perennial border garden 

We'll keep collecting specimens of wildflowers

Tonya Sharp, Colorado Division of Wildlife Officer,
educating us on how to re-educate the bears

We keep fine-tuning the way we live up here, from wildlife management to where to get our hair cut.  We haven’t seen evidence of any more bear visits, but we have made some changes in our behavior that probably has helped.  We invited Tonya Sharp, our local wildlife officer (Bob stopped referring to her as the Bear Lady after seeing the huge gun strapped to her hip), to come by and give us some advice.  We no longer seed feed, though we do continue to feed the hummingbirds.  Seed feeding is messy with the birds sorting through the mixed seeds, tossing the ones they don’t like over the side -- not this, not this, not this...THIS! -- so even if you bring in the feeder at night there’s still a mess on the ground, despite the best intentions of the ground squirrels.  And I’d seen enough of the regulars at the seed feeder -- Cassin’s finches, brown-headed cow birds, and pine siskins -- to last me a while.  If you sit for a few minutes and pay attention there are lots of interesting birds in the trees -- nuthatches, Stellar’s jays, juncos, woodpeckers, flickers, and sapsuckers, and even the occasional red-tailed hawk stops by a snag out front to scream at us before flying off.  We have the hummingbird feeder about twelve feet up a tree hooked to a pulley system and we fill it once in the morning and bring it in empty by mid to late-afternoon.  Sometimes I take a “rest” on the front steps with the full feeder and I’m never alone for long.  Good trick for a warm day as those little hummers’ wings whip up quite the breeze, and it’s wonderful to see them so close you can see the varying colors of their individual feathers.  And it’s too precious when they perch on your fingers.

Up close and personal with hungry lady hummers

Along with missing our Tucson friends, we’re missing our volunteer work and are thinking of what would work for us up here.  Bob is volunteering some chainsaw time to help folks clean-up their lots and will help with the semi-annual ranch clean-up when they bring in a HUGE chipper and feed in what’s been cleared, blowing the chips back into the forest.  He’s also volunteered to teach a little science to some neighboring kids who are home schooled...leeches will be the first segment.  I’ve filled out my application with the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Bear Aware program and will come up next spring for training so that I can go out and coach folks on how to live in bear country.

Make a big wish on this tennis ball-sized salsify seed head...and BLOW

We’ve reached the halfway mark in our first summer at the cabin, and loving it more all the time.  It’ll be odd to start counting down to our departure in early October, though we have much to go back to in Tucson.  I wouldn’t be surprised to be back up here during the holiday season for a couple of weeks.  May will just be too far away.  Pack up the car, Honey -- I’m needing a cabin fix!  So very nice to have options, and the time to exercise them.  

Squirrel psych-out -- it fooled our dog the first time she saw it!

Learning

We’re a third of the way through our first summer sojourn in our new cabin in the Rockies.  Semi-permanent residence is a whole new ball game, and we have already begun thinking of this as the ‘shake-down’ summer.  There’s a lot that’s worked just as we expected, but there have been some surprises, and we have some learning to do.

Just about perfection...

Red-tail Hawk seen on a 'round-the-block hike

With most of the cabin furnishing and provisioning done (we’re heading into Colorado Springs again tomorrow to get a couple of bookcases and a small coffee table at an unfinished furniture place) we’re settling into more of what we feel will be the normal rhythm of life in this remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains.  As Harry, our neighbor across the lake and maker of carved bears, once said to me, “This is still your life up here, just in a different place,” and he’s right.  There are still chores, things to take care of and keep track of, and now two sets of household bills to pay.  We still have a social life to enjoy and friends and family to keep up with (and miss), no matter where we are.  There’s a LOT of togetherness, so far a good thing, and still forays into civilization for shopping, libraries, and eating out.  

Our life in Tucson is in many ways quite similar to here, despite it’s proximity to the conveniences of living near a city.  Our home is out in the Tucson Mountain foothills and we spend a lot of time outside hiking, tending our yard, or watching the abundant wildlife, just as we do here.  Mind you, in Tucson Costco is 10 minutes away and Sunflowers for rational quantities of fresh produce the same, so you can literally run out to do a biweekly shopping in less time than it takes me to drive to a store where I can buy a gallon of milk.  ‘Going to town’ here, something we do once a week, takes on the excitement you read about in Little House on the Prairie...it’s a big, carefully planned event.  If you forget to buy sugar, the hummers are going to be complaining all week (as they do the second they run low on sugar water, from about three inches off your nose).

Cabin Life Lesson #1 - Keep good lists of needs and wants for the weekly trip to town, and try not to make it resemble the Bataan Death March 

Best.  Ever.  Chocolate.  Cookies.

It’s interesting to go a week or more with what’s on hand, especially if you get a last minute call that you have incoming house guests.  I try to keep plenty of the staples -- milk, bread, and eggs around.  For those more perishable items such as fruit and veggies, I’ve come up with a few tricks.  Bags of romaine lettuce hearts keep well.  I have a jars of things like sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, olives, pickles, and pickled vegetable mixes around for when I can’t run out to get more fresh tomatoes.  Half and half, something I almost never have in Tucson, is a less perishable back-up for when the milk for coffee runs low, and as back-up to the back-up, I have a bag of powdered milk.  I make sure to have a few bags of frozen vegetables -- petite peas, corn, and French cut green beans in the freezer for when the fresh greens are gone.  I have stooped to dehydrated parsley, more for color than flavor in soups and stews.  I keep a good-sized jar of pesto (Costco’s is GREAT) in the fridge, not for pasta which we don’t eat much of, but for a wonderful herby base for making salad dressing (a big spoonful with a little olive oil, white wine vinegar or lemon juice, salt & pepper -- fab!), mixing with mayo for Italian sandwiches, tossed with rice or potatoes, as a pistou in soups, in scrambled eggs -- you get the idea --  is good for that fresh herb taste.  We eat the most perishable stuff, like strawberries, first...apples will keep.  I keep things on hand for bread baking, and corn bread is quick and delicious baked in a cast iron pan in the oven (which I can use all the time here, unlike Tucson).  I finally have my spice inventory up to make just about any kind of cookie we feel like (and with the hiking we’re doing, a couple of cookies a day seem to do no harm, just good.  Provisioning for a remote location is mostly common-sense, but we take it a bit more seriously here than we do in Tucson.

Cabin Life Lesson #2 - Provision wisely, be prepared to cook a LOT and well -- food matters

Cottontail taking shelter

It’s so obvious up here that we’ve moved into the habitat of the wildlife, not the other way around.  It’s almost like the physician’s motto, first do no harm.  While I was down at the ranch house making my bear post, the bear was at our cabin eating our niger thistle seeds, and probably getting ready to take on the regular seed and humming bird feeders while our dog cowered inside (as she should have).  When we saw the thistle seed feeder down, chewed up, and empty, we immediately scanned the area for the bear, realizing we may have interrupted it.  We didn’t see it, but we did hear it bellowing just over the rocks towards the lake.  The next day we got serious and suspended our feeders from pulleys high up in the trees around the cabin.  We can lower them for refilling, but a bear would (and could) have to climb for them, and this bear is looking for an easy meal.  If we have more trouble with the bear and bird feeders, we’ll consider taking them down all together, though we are very much enjoying the fantastic bird-watching from our cabin.

Cabin Life Lesson #3 - Do all you can to live in harmony with the wildlife

Sunset from the swing

After about six weeks we admitted to ourselves, and each other, that we were feeling a bit restless; maybe a little bit bored.  Personally, I feel doing without the easy diversions of streaming video and personalized radio stations, movie theaters and libraries a short drive away, constant access to the Internet, and shops loaded with things you don’t need is a good thing, especially on a part-time basis.  My husband, not so much.  We haven’t seen quite as much of friends and family as we’d expected, and do miss our Tucson life in several ways -- our fairly busy social life, our volunteer work (and those we work with) at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Saguaro National Park, taking advantage of all the mod cons, and for my husband, recently retired, not work, but having more of a schedule.  This is definitely different, and mostly wonderful, but not without it’s challenges.  As with everything, no matter how great things are, they can become a little bit routine.  So we’ve decided to mix it up a bit, do more things, and make sure to do plenty of what’s so good here in the mountains.  First, remember how great it is to be here in the cool instead of in the 100+ degrees of a Tucson summer.  We’re reading more about the natural history of this area, to better understand and appreciate where we are (and how to be a good guest here).  We’re making sure we take a walk or hike every day, even if it’s just down the trail to the meadow, or more often our two mile ‘around the block’ hike, or to the overlook, or Cedar Mountain, or hiking the roads.  The hiking helps the cookies make sense.  Having overdosed on several books a week, we’re playing more games after dinner (I am getting walloped at Rummikub at the moment), doing the occasional jigsaw puzzles (I have a collection of some really good museum ones), and yes, listening to more NPR (but not too much) so we can bitch about congress and gird our loins for the campaign that is apparently (and appallingly) already underway.  We also have some non-provisioning day trips planned to experience more of this part of Colorado.  Oh, and more sunsets from the swing above our cabin.

Karen's Overlook, a favorite hiking destination with a view of Turkey Rock

Cabin Life Lesson #4 - Don’t get lazy, take anything for granted, or forget how wonderful your life is; be grateful and Be Where You Are Fully

More life lessons, cabin and otherwise, to come...no doubt.  In the meantime we’re off to play dominos with some friends at another cabin tonight and tomorrow we’ll head to town -- maybe I’ll get a piece of calico for a new apron or a shiny tin cup (reference may only be clear to lovers of Laura Ingalls Wilder).