It is early July and exactly one month since we moved out of our rental and spent our first night outdoors. We are still camping, but this adventure is about to come to an end. Three days from today, we are moving into our friends’ house just outside of Twisp. Continue reading
creekside thoughts
I am typing this post on the bank of a rushing creek, which runs through a corner of the Methow Valley that we recently discovered. Of course, there is no internet here, so I won’t post this until I go online, most likely tomorrow when I’m in town to use the wifi at the local bakery. I take that back – if we were like most people today and had smartphones, this post could go live five minutes after I finish composing it, as there is cell phone coverage just a quarter mile down the road. However, being the luddites that we are, there will be a bit of a lag between writing and posting. Continue reading
(wo)man plans, God laughs
Wow, second post in 10 days… What’s wrong with me??? Just kidding; I wish I could keep up this kind of blogging pace year-round. Anyway, a lot has changed since I wrote the previous post. Continue reading
speeding up? treading water?
I have much to write about (a rare occurrence) but little time (my constant refrain). I also continue to feel conflicted regarding how much to disclose on this blog as I have no idea who may be reading it. This makes it tough to be completely open about many aspects of our lives, and without such openness, I frankly don’t know whether it makes much sense to maintain this blog. I do keep coming back to this space, though, and it is on my mind much more often than the few times a year that I actually get to sit down and write, so perhaps there is some reason to keep it going after all, even if I don’t yet know what it is. Continue reading
more light
I’m writing this while sitting in our bathtub filled with warm fragrant water, exactly where I was one year ago, when we had just leased our house and came out here for New Year’s before moving in for good one month later.
2016 is coming to an end in less than three hours in our time zone. Continue reading
food
This is the second post in the thematic series that I launched earlier this year, where each post is devoted to my observations/reflections about a certain aspect of life in the Methow. Here is the first post in the series.
As we near the Thanksgiving holiday, with its lavish feasting to the point of overindulgence, food is on many Americans’ minds. Meal planning, recipe reading, grocery shopping, cooking, and baking are all happening at a frenetic pace in households across the country. While we have no Thanksgiving plans this year and will likely be spending the holiday by ourselves, with minimal cooking involved, I thought this would be a fitting opportunity to collect some of the food-related impressions from our 10 months in the Methow Valley. Continue reading
keeping the fire alive
It’s a chilly, on-and-off drizzly November night. I am sitting by the wood stove in our house, with our dog competing for space with the computer on my lap. Today, P. felled his first tree with the chainsaw that he recently learned how to use. We spent the first half of the day getting the tree back to our house, which involved a lot of sawing, chopping, and loading on P.’s end and a bit of hauling on mine. Continue reading
water
This is meant to be the first in the series of those thematic posts that I first envisioned writing back in the winter, shortly after we moved here. The idea is to collect some impressions about some part of our lives here that is fundamentally different than it was in the city, and try to bring them together and make some sense of them in a blog post.
So, water. Continue reading
make it worthwhile
Shortly after writing my previous post, I drafted another one, a long piece that was supposed to open that series of thematic posts that I wrote about. Then the situation I was writing about changed, and I wanted to go back and make some edits but time got away from me. Then I felt like the post was a little too emotional and naive anyway and maybe not worth publishing. Then I changed my mind. Continue reading
in the midst of all this
We’ve been here – in the Methow – for over a month now, although it certainly does not feel that long. Time goes by fast when there is a lot going on.
methowbound 