A CABIN UPDATE

I've been vilified for not blogging more often with updates about the cabin. If the complaint came from some average Joe I would shrug it off, but THIS guy...this guy who gave me the "what-for"...for this guy I will bow to the admonishment and comply.

The cabin has ceased to be mostly a construction zone and is slowly, oh so very slowly, becoming a home. We have that toilet (oh how we creatures love our comfort) and that hot shower, and a kitchen sink with hot-and-cold. We have a mattress that sits on top of a bed frame (no box spring but hey, we're mountain men. We don't need no stinkin' box spring) and an installed, unfinished, hardwood floor on the main level. We have a metal pole in the master bedroom closet, on which I have displayed several hangers for hanging up clothes such as civilized people are known to do. I can even put my shoes on the floor and not expect ants in them in the morning.

We have a TV and a RADIO and a BOX FAN, and a PORTABLE AIR CONDITIONER and a WORKING OVEN and a STOVE TOP. If we get too much more uppity we might be in danger of being called city folk, which is quite the opposite of our intention...at least until it's time to cook, or shower, or watch Blue Bloods.

This past weekend we worked outside, the temperature being so nice: a very livable 70 degrees at the peak of the day, while back home, where our house still hasn't sold, it was 92 in the sticky shade.

Oh the pleasure of working outdoors when it's breezy and fresh and mild. Especially when you're trying to roll drippy brown stain onto fascia boards 20' above your head. It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been standing on a pea gravel slope that skidded away from me each time I tried to swing that flexible extension wand up. The effort required to get the drippy brown stain roller up to the boards was the same effort that would be required to send it sailing off into the woods. Which is pretty much what happened--or threatened to happen--with each hurl.

Meanwhile the noon sun burned a hole through my retinae.

After I finished staining myself and the boards and after my vision wasn't all purply any more, PW promised me I could do an easier job: digging great big holes with the post hole digger in the dirt banks, where roots the size of intestines snaked throughout. Into these holes I was responsible for planting the chestnut trees and the magnolia. Each of these trees were in 50-gallon buckets that had to be dragged to the holes because I did not have access to a forklift. After the holes were dug 2 hours later, I switched hats and became a one-person water brigade, hoping to give all my hard work a fighting chance.

The blueberry bushes were easier to plant, since they were just 5-gallon buckets and only needed to be planted in full sun on a rock ledge that repelled the spade like some sort of magnet.

I came away with blisters, a pounding headache and some heat-induced dizziness. And where was PW, you may well ask, while I was doing all the work?

In the basement--where it was FORTY DEGREES and flat, with no pea gravel slopes, dirt banks or rock ledges--working on his movie theater wiring.

We're still married and no one killed anyone, so I suppose you could say it was a successful weekend. In addition to cabin work, we met with Father Robert who shepherds a flock of Episcopal sinners--soon to include me and PW--in our little NC town. We were present for the fledging of 3 healthy, hungry Eastern Phoebes. We watched some gorgeous deer run up an embankment as if it was flat land, just in awe of their physicality and beauty. We enjoyed the antics of chipmonks scurrying in and out of rocks looking for fallen bird seed. And we were, once again, treated to the miraculous sight of Blue Ghost fireflies and Lightning Bugs, blinking their mating calls in the inkiness of night on raw land in the mountains, where there is no light-polluting Walmart.

So my dear friend from Peace, if you're reading this--and you darn well better be--thanks for being "this guy" and giving me the nudge. It was just what I needed.