Currently

Our first night in the cabin, dehydrated and weary, we line up our mattresses on the unfinished floor. Our eyelids are heavy, but we steal a few pre-bedtime minutes for shadow puppets on the wall. We are here, we whisper. Finally here.

We wake up to deer. Eat our weight in granola and swim to the island in our sandals. Find the nearest huckleberry bush. Gather wildflower bouquets for a friend.

We don’t have much, so we make what we must. Stacked limestone slabs produce lovely end tables, enough room for a mug and a waterlogged copy of Summer of the Monkeys. We forage for Oregon grapes, wild strawberries. I mend a chair, albeit poorly. We chop wood, count our blisters. Bathe in the lake. Dry a bundle of mullein.

In July, we watch fireworks on the peak of a mountain, over a failed bonfire in the pouring rain. Each burst looks like a fistful of glitter, like a toddler’s art project. I’ve only in my life seen fireworks from below, never above. I wonder aloud what else feels big but isn’t.

The kids set a goal to catch 100 crayfish, and they do. I order the apricot brie sandwich at a taproom. The kids skip dessert and skip rocks instead. We watercolor yarrow, arnica. We stock up on duck egg cartons. Sometimes, I get to rock twin babies to sleep.

When the kids and I make it to town, we bring our library haul to the skate park, find the shadiest trees to read under. We ride scooters around the thrift store. Hurry home to catch wild turkeys on the trail camera, pass a prairie of elk along the way.

Next time, we’ll remember to buy suet for the hummingbirds.

Our neighbors invite us for espresso. We have brunch in the home of a hunter, under the frozen stares of his game. I’ll teach you, he nudges, and my son’s eyebrows grow higher than the mounted lynx overhead.

We spend our birthdays – four in all – splashing around in Avalanche Creek. The summer is ending, and we feel it and we know it and we fight it anyway.

It occurs to me that our hearts are straddling state lines. No longer Midwestern, still not quite able to drop the Mid. But there is one moment I can pinpoint, one recognition that we have all made a transition that expands beyond borders.

I read a newspaper article of a forty-something woman who reports she’s unable to sleep without melatonin, sleep masks, sound machines, a strict protocol. Sleep hygiene, she calls it. And I am suddenly aware of how good I sleep here, how deeply restful this is, in an off-grid one-room cabin full of my children and a husband and a dog. How uninterrupted we all slumber, save for the sunrise.

It’s a trade-off, to be fair. Sweat stains on every tee, aching thighs, dirt in our toenails, dust on our hems. A far cry from the popcorn and game nights of yesteryear. But we are all happy and healthy, wildly productive, working toward taming the land.

Or, perhaps more accurately: working toward wilding ourselves.