The first year we were here, early in winter, I lost my phone. We’d just returned home for the evening that night and I, certain that I’d dropped it on the mile-long trail between camp and the Jeep, took My Native’s phone and a headlight, and traced and retraced my …
Imagine you’re eleventy months pregnant when planting the year’s garden. If you can’t imagine yourself at such an unimaginable gestational length of time, I’ll disclose that gardening in such a condition entails rolling between rows on your own girth, or a general butt-scooting amid the feeling that one’s entire …
It’s been a while. Â We’ve been a little busy… Project Cabin is not far from finished, but we had quickly outgrown the “bed” in the Cramper, a bed which earns its quotational glyphs by being, fundamentally, a thirty-year-old piece of foam. Like just about everything in the Cramper, it was …
The expansions of living space and living occupants of Cooter Hollow have thwarted any attempts at regular updates, as waddling and face-stuffing, as it happens, takes many precious hours of the ticking stuff. The winter in these parts has been a strange one, leaving us without our expected several feet …
The other night I was shaken awake a few hours early to be informed that my Native was heading to the bathroom. Now, this is not an issue of conjoined-at-hip extreme co-dependency, but an act of courtesy we always extend the other before leaving camp, so that the remaining mate …
In the spicy mustard salad days of our early courtship, when we still shat indoors and water came from taps, I would travel by train to visit my Native on weekends. On the first or second of these visits, after the compulsory dances of the newly wooed, he offered dinner: …
When it comes to the planting and growing of stuff, I harbor a little bit of a spooky lifey anti-choice fundamentalist nut. (Not that I’d disclose anything about my political positions…) But I spend so much time preparing and starting seeds for the weaker and spindlier seedlings to be chucked …
It wouldn’t be a hard stretch of the brain to imagine Cooter Hollow as some sort of magical place where Cheap Chinese Generators go to die, or at least succumb to our own peculiar style of enhanced interrogation. Historically, when we’ve needed a generator, it’s because the one before it …
These are pigs. But you know that much. I gave these pigs names, names I haven’t shared with anybody, and I won’t share them with you. Because these are last year’s pigs, which means they’re now resting quietly in the freezers and stomachs of friends and neighbors. They lived in …
It’s snowing, right now, flurrying in a way that will stick to the sour taste in my mouth if not to the ground. My seedlings are dying to see the light of day, and I’m wilting right behind them. Oh, but I could candle-dip melodrama on and on (being stuck …
