Mini house tour!

It's a mini house, but it feels just the right size to me. I wanted to take some pictures when things were at the very peak of tidiness, because it's all downhill from here, baby. The last big thing there is to do is make a concrete countertop and install the kitchen sink, and oh, what a luxury that will be!

After a year of living on Hungry Raven Hill, much has come together - we have a new pine floor, refrigeration, an oven and a shower. We have screens on the windows, and on the other side of those, is the bugs. It all feels rather civilized. The downside is, our thick walls muffle the nightsongs we slept under the spell of last summer, in the tent. I rarely hear an owl hoot, and haven't been lullabyed to sleep by the coyotes in months.

Matt and I both have been fighting burnout. Now that the house is comfortable, we've been dedicating more time to our day jobs (for Matt, that is a temporary gig making pizzas with a mobile wood oven/caterer; for me, selling art at farmers markets and craft fairs). And we are both ready for a break. We miss camping. We miss spending time together not working. We are trying to get back to that. I will keep you posted, and in the meantime, I hope you are very well.

On the cusp

Winter is melting, and this makes me feel panicky. Because where did winter go? I was going to have all my shit together by the end of it. But here we are, and I've haven't. Any of it. At all.

But... I love this cusp - the one where there is all the exquisite expectation of spring, none of it spent yet, only anticipated - and it is stretching long this year. A morning of strong sun rays warming our forest, drawing sap up from under the frost, and then all of it crystallizing and dissolving into dense snow flurries that block out the mountains across the swamp. When this happens, I say thank you kind merciful earth, for I am not yet ready.

Our little sleeping loft is a quiet cocoon. My aunt sent us a quilt made of old sweaters for our bed. It is teal and purple and weighty with sleep and warmth and darkness. I am not prepared to crawl out from up there.

In the past year, we built a house. We sold a house (just two weeks ago, and with much relief). I have never stopped thinking about my illustration career, business, marketing. I have been solely focused on accomplishments of the roof-over-our-heads-and-food-on-our-table variety. Matt has shouldered more than his fair share of those burdensome thoughts as well. I am sick of them. Recently I have felt a shell of a person, and the only time I've been really me was the day I followed a filthy trail in the snow, littered with bits of lichen and studded with perfect little ochre-colored turds, to the den of a porcupine, tucked under a tumble of mossy boulders, deep inside an enchanted bower of red elder canes. I saw the porkie's muddy paw prints and I inquired at the mouth of his cave. I saw where he went up a sugar maple and stripped the fine branches and, presumably, swayed and pooped in the breeze. I tracked his route to a hemlock, neatly crowned, the ground beneath strewn with deep green trimmings. The snow slowly melting and revealing layers of porcupine travel patterns, established over a season.

With taps and buckets borrowed from friends, we've collected sap from seven of our sugar maples, and boiled it down into the first batch of Hungry Raven Hill syrup. The days are longer now, and it is nice to be drawn outside. Yesterday we watched a barred owl and a sharp-shinned hawk fighting over territory. They were like two fragments of the forest - big flakes of gray bark - broken free and bashing each other in the branches. This morning there were little duck-footed waddling paw prints in the fresh snow. Raccoon? He went hither and thither and not much of anywhere at all, then up over the bank and away.

That is the small news. The big news is that Matt, my very own Matt(!), performed a miracle on Easter Sunday, and brought forth clear clean water from deep under the ground. We have running water! You can turn a handle and water comes out of a pipe, into your drinking glass! It doesn't have algae in it, and you don't have to twist your ankle and slide down an icy precipice to get to it. Halle-fucking-lujah! And thank you, Matt. I am eternally grateful.

Enormous Tiny Art Show #17, plus an etsy sale!

The Enormous Tiny Art Show is back! Over the holidays, I took a two week break from house construction and the vortex of chaos+debris we have been enjoying here at Hungry Raven Hill over the past many months. While Matt and his sister drove to Duluth to visit family, I spent my (working) vacation at Mom and Dad's house. Besides stuffing my face and cuddling the cat, I drew these six new works for ETA17. This is a really fun, diverse show with work by over 40 artists. If you can't see it in person, here it is online: Enormous Tiny Art Show. The drawings above are available on my page.

And also, there's a sale in my etsy shop! I'm moving my tiny studio into my teeny house, and there isn't room for all this art. Would you like some? zoetilleyposter.etsy.com

The settling in

I've found it difficult to write here lately, and I think it's because this house is a big hungry gobble-monster, and what it likes to eat best is creative energy. So I just don't have much left over to write with. But I'm going to try.

We finished the drywall, and vacuumed up all the dust. The gobble monster doesn't eat dust, but it does make dust. You see.

That was a happy day, the vacuuming one. An even happier day was when we finished painting, just this past week. I belabored the point of choosing a color, as I am wont to do, but I can make fun of myself now because I picked the perfect one! It is a warm, smoky gray with a little lavender and orchid. Pictures are going to look really good on the walls. Cacti in bloom are going to look really good in the deep window wells. My cat, when I get one, is going to like this color. It's going to run right in the door and curl up in a sun spot because it feels so at home.

We have a loft for sleeping. I am pretty sure it is a bad idea to move into a sleeping loft just when you are becoming an arthritic old person, but oh well. There is also the problem of having to pee, because the ladder in the middle of the night is kind of extra discouraging. But oh well again. I have discovered in recent months that there is a lot a person can get used to, and besides, the loft is very cozy and fort-like.

Our insulation and passive solar are working! We have not yet burned a cord of wood, and if the sun is beaming in the windows, the temperature rises fast and there is no need for a fire. Sometimes there is a need to run outside and stick your head in the snow, but that is an okay problem to have, as problems go.

The tent collapsed under the heavy, wet snow that also knocked out our power for a week in December. We were not in the tent (we'd moved into the house), so it seemed quite funny. Important belongings were salvaged, and the rest will wait til spring.

Matt is spending a lot of time in the utility closet, where he has two tanks, an electric panel and a whole bunch of pipes and wires and conundrums. Sometimes he comes out for snacks.

That's just about everything! We have rounded the corner from feral beasts living in the midst of an itchy debris heap to domesticated children sleeping in a pile of sticks with a clean warm blanket. That feels like a milestone.