Cabin Life, Chapter Four

Gardening

What do we do at the cabin?

Sometimes I garden.

Gardening at a mountain cabin? What are you talking about??

When I first married into the cabin, I admired some bearded iris across the creek at another cabin.

Then, I transplanted some from our real house to the cabin.

We have had one bloom; it was in July, 2017. (Only took me 15 minutes to find that date. . . the photo was so unremarkable that it got deleted awhile ago.)

A neighbor has a lush front yard, and she graciously allows me to transplant things, which sometimes survive.

A trick is to keep the transplants watered, and to mark them so that people don’t just assume it is basic forest floor, free for unstructured trampling.

We have lots of currant bushes in the area, and they get full of dead branches. My theory about this is that the bushes will thrive and grow if the old stuff is cleared away. Sometimes I wonder if, when I pull out the dead stuff, the shrub is thinking, “HEY! I was eating that!”

It is possible that I have too much thinking time.

When the fire crews were clearing brush in an arbitrary manner during the fall of 2021, they made these very neat rows of their prunings. Random hacking, organized stacking. They won’t be returning to haul these piles away, so I am now using them when I do my own clearing.

Sometimes I rake, sometimes I use the large magnet on a pole to gather nails in a nearby driveway. (That’s another story, a long one.) 

And sometimes I wander around, wishing that I knew when and how to transplant things from God’s garden.

 

 

Cabin Life, Chapter Three

 

Puttering

What does one do in a place without electricity, internet, cell phones, or even a working landline? (“Working” being the important word, since we no longer have a phone but rely on our neighbor’s intermittent line.)

An aspect of cabin living at a slower pace is the concept of puttering. Puttering is aimlessly doing a bit of this, a bit of that.

Sometimes I just start polishing our wood stove.

 Sometimes I rearrange the collection of peculiar found items and pretty rocks.

Occasionally I wander around with my camera, looking for new angles and ways the sunshine hits things.

Recently I was curious about the various temperatures of all the flowing water. So, we walked around with a thermometer and recorded the temperatures, then played a guessing game with neighbors as to which was the coldest, and which was the warmest*.

Easily entertained, yeppers.

*Warmest: Chihuahua; Coldest: Spring Creek

Cabin Life, Chapter Two

Slower Pace

What in the world do people do at a rustic cabin up a difficult road in a place without electricity?

We slow down. We sleep more—go to bed earlier, sleep later (the sun doesn’t hit the cabin until around 8:30 a.m.), and some of us take naps. Could be the elevation, could be that it is cooler and there isn’t a great need to get up early to beat the heat.

We linger over coffee, usually while listening to the radio. (Remember those?)

The old wood stove provides heat until the sunshine hits; then the cabin doors get opened to the outside.

This stove is now history, because the oven didn’t work, and one time it tried to kill us. But that’s a digression, one I might share with you later.

In summary, at the cabin, we slow down. Or, as Trail Guy has often said, “We contemplate matters of consequence.”

The friendships grow

img_1316.jpgimg_1311.jpgimg_1312.jpgimg_1313.jpgimg_1314.jpgowner.jpg

Remember the Sawtooth Six from a blog posting last year? They were back this past weekend! Wow, time flies!

The funniest moment was when they realized they had forgotten tonic and had to call me down the hill to deliver. The calls were frequent and pathetic; when we saw each other across the valley for the first time, instead of hollering “hello”, they shouted “Did you bring the tonic?”

These photos were taken rather spontaneously. Normally they all line up on the porch of the cabin for their official photo, but this year Michael and I wanted to hit the trail before they were prepared. So, I snapped these in a moment of I-Can’t-Believe-The Weekend-Visit-Is-Already-Over.

Evidence that the friendship between us and them is growing – I actually sat down with them at their cabin for a real visit; they brought us their leftover food when closing the cabin; an official invitation was extended to join in one of their traditions next year; and, a few hugs were exchanged upon good-byes. The good part? Time flies, and next year will come quickly. I had a few words of advice before parting: eat more produce, hike more, and stay longer! And, I should have added, “Make a grocery list!”