Here

I spoke with a friend recently who admitted to envisioning our life here like a wee family of woodland fairies – traipsing about, foraging in the heather, tangled hair long and loose and wild in the sunset. Certainly barefoot, she says. The barefoot part is true, for some of the children some of the time, but all else is much more feral in reality. There are no toadstool mushrooms in this rocky soil, not yet at least, and our days as of late have been spent slinging rebar and troweling concrete. While I’m prone to calling this life Little House on the Prairie with Starlink, it is, more accurately – at the moment – Fixer Upper meets Man, Woman, Wild.

Just weeks ago, a welding tool gone rogue at the eleventh hour left us with a morning deadline and 770+ rebar ties to secure manually. By the light of Ryobi, we worked until 4am, me trudging dramatically around a prison of my own rebarring (not a verb, I’m told). When the sun rose, I hopped in the side-by-side to guide two concrete trucks and a pump boom up the mountain – a move we all assumed would end my involvement in the project.

When do they start? the kids ask as we settle cross-legged into a mound of dirt, ready to watch twenty yards of concrete pour forth.
They don’t, Ken says, handing me a trowel. They’re just delivering. We’re operating. 

And so, my oldest daughter guides an elephant trunk of rock sludge up, down and around Ken’s painstakingly placed forms while Ken and I follow, smoothing everything but my spirits until we crash on our backs sometime before dinner, dried concrete caked to our shoelaces. It is hard livin’, is what I’m saying.

It is a life understood by few, least of all myself. But it is one that could be beautiful someday, that is beautiful now, when we remember to look up. Ken, who loves every minute of the challenge, once told friends this was “the ultimate experience.” But when I tried to echo the sentiment, it came out “the ultimate experiment.” Truly, this is the perfect characterization of our partnership – he, a man of adventure and grit. Me, a lover of crossword puzzles.

I am learning a great deal from those around me, the hearty ones who teach us of butchering chickens, of canning preserves, of keeping the firewood stockpiled. Last Sunday, I asked a 10-year-old girl who grew up in these parts how she keeps her barn cats safe in the winter. What do you mean? she questions, dumbfounded at my assumption that a working animal might be treated as a pet, coddled and warm, safe within the human realm of control. They’re cats! she says, smoothing the wrinkles out of her tulle dress. Just cats.

This has been my prayer for the season at hand: forbearance. To take what is given with both hands, to meet the task, to trudge through little by little.

Early this month, when snow dumped onto my outdoor kitchen and we realized we’d need to pivot projects before the dish water froze, Ken set to work moving our beds into the bunk cabin to allow just enough space for a plumbed sink, the fridge, and our freezer. (At 250 ft2, just enough is the operative phrase.) But that meant everything in the bunk cabin needed to move, too, which is how the kids and I found ourselves shortly after midnight drifting to sleep cross-legged in a pile of books, snow gear, power tools, bedding, laundry, muddy boots and perishable food items, a hot fire burning in the stove while Ken faithfully positions the freezer.

You’re handling this remarkably well, Ken says to me.

I realize he is right. We are all handling this remarkably well.

There are many moments here where there is no alternative but to get to work, to tote boxes of belongings from one cabin to another, to carry tools from one shipping container to another, over and over and over, to step on and sift through the shrapnel of a life until you crash on the ground and catch the rest you’re offered, just right there in a swirling state of chaos.

Here, I have cooked a multi-course dinner with a single spatula, a trio of pans scattered at my feet. I have washed underwear in the lake, I have chopped and stacked cords of wood, I have flicked spiders from my bed. Here, I have chased mice with a stick. I have boiled gallons of water over a wood stove, have plucked splinters from pinkies, have brushed molars by moonlight.

Here, I have grieved. I have sought comfort in the most uncomfortable surroundings – bracing wind, freezing temps, rocky terrain. Here, I have found peace despite it all.

Here, we take our meals cross-legged on the splintered OSB floor, not yet space or need for a table and chairs. Here, we have forgotten the luxury of cubed ice clinking in a cold glass, or a cold glass for that matter. We drink daily from mugs secured by construction screws dotting the studs of a still-exposed-but-lovingly-insulated wall. Here, we dump dirty dishwater onto the fire pit to signal the day’s end. Here, we are constantly atop each other, continually tripping over shoes or cats, always losing important items like pens or tape measures. Hairbrushes.

I suppose, then, my friend is exactly right. We are, indeed, traipsing about – our tangled hair long and loose and wild in the sunset.

Here, there is no other way to be.