Hungry raven hill

This is our new home. We are living in a wall tent. It is sixteen by twenty, set on a platform, with room inside for our camp kitchen, bed, tools, my desk, and even an occasional guest. It is bigger than our house will be. It has a deck, where we cook and eat and drink and watch the weather.

The weather! I have seen nothing like it. Matt lived in Flagstaff once, and this reminds him of that - mountain weather. Always the clouds passing over - the high clouds are slow and drifty, the low clouds are bent hell-to-the-wind and racing. We are inside the tent looking out, watching thunderstorms extinguish our whole meadow full of fireflies, or outside, grabbing power tools and diving for cover.

We have a spring that bubbles out of the ground. Matt rigged up a special refrigerator of sorts. It's a cooler with a copper coil inside, and it siphons cold spring water through to keep the cream and butter and eggs fresh.

We have baby ravens, who talk all the time. For a while they just jostled one another in a line on a long drooping branch, but now they fly high, high up in the sky and do their jostling aloft.

We have owlets. At night they do hooting lessons with their parents, who so patiently recite who cooks for you. The babies say it back, but all panicked and backward.

We have morels. They came cascading down the hillsides and into our baskets. We dropped our baskets, fell to our knees, and opened our mouths. The morels tumbled in.

What else can I say? At first, I was so happy. I love camping. This is camping all the time. But then again it's life, and pesky useless worries come creeping round. I try to remember this is the most special summer ever, and do not let anything ruin that, even for a moment. I already love this home with a deepness I never felt in Scranton.

Matt is in his element, and it makes me happy to see him here. He fells trees and splits firewood and digs trenches with his tractor, and goes in search of rock to climb and wild greens to forage, and finds cliff side nests and bear cubs. He's in the midst of a tapestry of forest so broad it's like an ocean, and I think that's right where he's meant to be.

I hope to document the summer here, as best I can. No internet yet, and no phone. We have power, though, and a half-built shed. A well and a house will be next.