I Watched from the Dirt Road
Title From: Fire Red Horse by The Lone Bellow
Where My Heart Can Roam
This is one of my favorite photographs from our nomadic summer. I’d like to have a print made to hang around these barren walls but, as I said before, I don’t usually keep track of the original full-size images I finally choose among them all, which I find very annoying about myself at this moment. It’s our favored campsite on the BLM land near Castle Gardens, outside of Ten Sleep, Wyoming. There was something about the smell of the sagebrush, the open range, the red hills in the distance, and the solitary feeling that appealed to us. If I could build a home anywhere on Earth, it would be right there. Title From: Weathervane by Miner
Where the Fields Are Painted Gold
Title From: Bloom by The Paper Kites
And May You Need Never to Banish Misfortune
Things are troublesome here at the moment. When I wrote the mini bio for this blog I said, “the hovel I call home,” but hovel was written about 60% in jest. A hovel is defined, according to dictionary.com, as “a small, very humble dwelling house; a wretched hut.” Originally, I was hinting at the humble dwelling portion of that definition, now we’re approaching the wretched hut portion. Our bedroom floor has collapsed. I can’t believe I have had to write that sentence. Now, to avoid giving the wrong impression, our bedroom floor isn’t caved in with all the contents in a heap down a giant crack through the room. There are support beams that remain intact and some portions of the floor are still holding solid. However, one 1.5′ x 2.5′ section is now carpet covering a void. I can thwump it like a trampoline. I don’t know how deep the hole goes but it’s definitely a hole. Multiple other sections, all along the main walking path through the room, are soft, with another section immediately on the verge of collapse. Should this new portion fall into the abyss beneath the carpet, I will have to leap along the support…
A Cold Wind’s Whispering Secrets in Your Ear
In every state I’ve lived in, someone has used the line “If you don’t like the weather here, give it ten minutes and it’ll change,” but never has that been more accurate than my time here in Montana. Last Saturday we had our windows open, enjoying the mid-sixty breezes that brought the smell of crunchy fallen leaves and wood smoke drifting through the house. By Sunday night we had the heater cranked up to counter the drop to single digits and snow was whipping furiously in every direction. In our tiny Connecticut cabin, we had a monstrous wood-stove we relied on for all our heat. There were a few baseboard heaters but they couldn’t keep the drafty former-stable-turned-home above freezing and there is a charge on Connecticut electricity bills for “transfer” as there are no power plants in the state itself, so they have to purchase power from neighboring states, which means any electricity you use is essentially doubled in price. Rather than experience more than one $600 electricity bill, we burned. Unfortunately we don’t have any alternate source of heating in our home here, where -11 seems to have cemented itself as our daily temperature. Hopefully the electricity is…
