What it's like

Let me tell you what it's like, living out here. I've wanted to tell you that for awhile. People ask, is it like camping? The answer is, it is and it isn't.

I love camping. When I'm camping, I'm my happiest. I'm silly and relaxed and in touch with the place I'm in and the person I am. I like myself when I'm camping.

This is like that, because we are in the outdoors, all the time. Even when we're sleeping, it's just the tent canvas between us and the stars. Throughout June, there were so many fireflies in our clearing, and so many stars in the sky, that they met where the treetops ended, and it was just one sparkling veil from the ground up into the Milky Way. The black was so black, it was bottomless and ever expanding.

The owls talk across the hills to one another, and I hear them when I'm swimming up from dreams at night. They are in the trees when I stumble out the tent flaps in the wee hours to pee in the grass. There is one called the Little Monkey Owl, whose hoots are very silly. There is Cockamamie Raven, who fledged from the nest this year, and never quite seemed to grow up all the way.

There is Mouse, who enters the camp kitchen late at night and finds a good chip bag or brown paper sack to crumple loudly. He jumps from mason jar to mason jar with just enough oomph to make a satisfying sound when the lid depresses and then pops back. When I rise from bed to confront him about his Unacceptably Loud Midnight Trespass, he perches on the edge of the peanut butter jar and questions me with his enormous satellite-dish ears: you wouldn't pick me up and throw me, would you? little old me?

There is a hummingbird that visits each morning while we're having coffee. We have a small garden of potted plants on the tent deck. There are zinnias, nicotiana, nasturtiums and verbena, and hummingbird enjoys them all, then perches on the little cage of branches I made for our tomato plant. One of these days she'll be off to sunnier shores, and we'll miss her as we're warming our fingers on our mugs.

It smells good here, like different kinds of honey (the locust, the milkweed, the goldenrod), or like hot balsam. It never smelled so sweet in Scranton. Today when I called and left a message for a friend, I had one small pang of missing our back porch in Scranton... I thought how nice it would be to sit there with her and share a bottle of wine, like we used to do. I can honestly say that was the only such pang I've had. This is home now, and I am attached.

The part of this that is not like camping is the pressure. We now have a house shaped box, but it isn't the kind of cozy box a person could spend the winter in. There's a long way to go. Will we have time to do it all? Will we have enough money? These are the constant questions, besides all the technical ones like, how the hell are you supposed to fucking do this? I ask myself that many times a day. Then I ask Matt, then I ask my dad, then sometimes he asks our friend Carl, and when all else fails I ask the internet. In the end I either get the right answer or cobble together whatever-it-is in the best fashion I can.

So, that is what it's like. I am sitting here in the house, listening for the first time to the rain on the roof. We got the felt on just before the weather turned. Or rather, I watched Matt swing and scamper back and forth across the roof and roll out reams of felt and tack them down while I clung white-knuckled and for-dear-life to the totally bombproof rope and harness he'd rigged up for me. I am grateful that he is not a'feared of heights, or we'd have a very short house indeed.