Best & Worst
Poetry + fire = best!
Somehow, it’s 8:22am on a Tuesday and I just finished using the dust pan & brush to sweep our small cabin’s small floor for the second time this morning. When your front yard is a dirt field, I guess that happens. Worst.
When I look up from my computer screen and out the window, all I see are trees and sky. Best.
It’s currently 41-degrees out (June 20). Thanks to our wood stove, it’s a toasty 75. Best.
Before making breakfast this morning, I loaded a block of ice into our food storage cooler, which I grabbed in town yesterday and left in the car in my designated ice transport cooler overnight. Loading the cooler also means scooping out the water from the last block. It means shifting around all of the food contents and making room for new items and splashing water all over the place in the process. It means transporting the water outside to a storage container (no water wasted here) and putting the bag the ice came in on a drying stick outside so I can make use of the bag later on after it dries out. Worst. (Okay, well, maybe not worst, but it’s not my fave. Did I mention I do this every other day?)
Something I’m noticing more & more as time goes on in living where we do off-grid in the woods, is how much I’m enjoying not having neighbors - the kind that live right next door. I don’t recall ever feeling all that bothered by next door neighbors when we lived in town. Sure, there were occasional times when someone would be doing something too loud too late at night or the tool repair shop in the alley behind us was a chore to live next to, but I wasn’t propelled to live in the woods based on being fed up with having neighbors. But then, up until moving on the land last July, I’ve never lived in a place without close neighbors, so I never knew what it felt like to not have them. Turns out, it’s really nice. I’m especially enjoying not needing to curtain our windows. There’s an energetic ease I am connecting with that centers around not being on public display all the time. Not having grass to water & mow; not needing to put time & energy into generating curb appeal; being able to walk around freely in various states of undress; near never being in the position where someone will come to our door unexpectedly. Best.
Images above: Best & another best. Turns out, it’s not so much a thing to snap pics of what constitutes as the worst.
This morning, our newly acquired cat Larch - who magically appeared in the woods 6-7 weeks ago when we were on a walk and then followed us home - was stricken with a bout of spunky energy and started pulling tufts of insulation out from our wallless walls. Did I mention we don’t have interior walls just yet, only the visible backside of bats of insulation? Worst.
Even though it’s overcast & gray, our two PV panels are bringing in juice to charge up our batteries as part of our solar power system. It’s not a lot, but it’s doing something. Best.
It’s so so incredibly & wonderfully quiet. Best.
I could go on like this for a while. Outlining what’s best & what’s “worst” when it comes to living off-grid in the woods. I put worst in quotations because I’ve intentionally used this term in a very cavalier fashion here. More for comedic value than to relay deep levels of upset. Don’t get me wrong, the things I’ve deemed “worst” are genuinely things that cause me irritation in some fashion, but worst they are not. I mean really, if a very nice cat friend joyfully playing with some bits of insulation is as bad as it gets, things are going pretty darn well I’d say.
P.S After wrapping up this blog post, I stood up to stretch and there was a buck munching on some grass just outside our cabin. Best.
P.P.S A few minutes later, on my way to use the outhouse, a fresh kill from Larch met me on the way. Did I mention Larch is a skilled hunter and is living his best life out here as a furry woodsman? I mean, if cats ate what they killed that’s one thing. But when they kill a man just to watch him die, well, it’s not the best. In fact, one could say it’s kinda the worst.