We came across on the barge in the truck yesterday in a snowstorm and it is still snowing as I write this. I have enough wood on the covered porch that I can wait this one out in slippers. The dripping of melting snow off the roof sounds noisy on a sleeping island. I welcome the silence like fresh air. This morning we watched a deer out the window. It's ears were up listening, probably to our mouselike noise where none existed before. Mid-morning I dug out the butter yellow wooden chair out of the back of the truck for Babygirl and put it beside my rocking chair on the covered back porch. Bundled up in snowsuits we ate warm peanut butter cookies that we had just finished baking. The connection to the landscape and the straight forward work of a cabin life satisfies something in my soul. Later with Babygirl in the pack I carried her down the beach. I found a partial skull of a sea animal washed up in the beach gravel and seaweed. As I gently brushed off the wet, clinging snow with my ungloved hand I marveled at my ignorance for not knowing what animal it was. Yet, I felt a kinship for it and it reminded me the lesson all animals and birds live.
"There's a lightness in things. Only we people move forever burdened, pressing ourselves onto everything, obsessed by weight. How strange and devouring our ways must seem to those for whom life is enough." Rainer Maria Rilke, Songs to Orpheus

Sent from my iPhone
Sent from my iPhone