It's been a wonderful first week at our new residence, which we have lovingly dubbed "Cedar Grove". The property is heavily wooded and the majority of the larger trees are grand old cedars. Lots of big ones surround ourlittle home. There is something magical about the morning mist rising from chilly cedars in the warmth of the morning sun. We had a very light dusting of snow last night, only the third time we have seen any "snowfall" in two months. It melted by lunch time.
Throughout the day, we can hear but not see through the surrounding forests, in addition to the abundant bird species, one neighbor's flock of rowdy geese and ducks and another neighbor's sheep calling to each other. It's pretty neat that hobby farms are so common here.
Today, while pausing in the yard to soak up some precious sunshine, an eagle floated right over our heads. The sun seems to poke through the heavy cloud layer for only a few minutes (if at all) for many days on end. So, when I see it bust through, I stop what I'm doing and go outside to stand there and soak it in. Pretty sure my skin has not been so pale and unfreckly since I was trapped indoors by high school walls over a decade ago. It's taken some getting used to. I have been supplementing with a liquid vitamin D daily, which traditional and naturopathic physicians have urged that all Canadians should be doing, since we get a lesser degree of the light of life waaaay up North here. Not sure if it helps, but it feels good to think that it does something.
Also, we purchased a Lite Book. It's a small table top light designed to mimic actual sunlight for dark chilly winter's days. We used it frequently last winter/spring in Alberta when it was gray and cold outside. I was super skeptical about it. But it really does perk us both up when we are feeling blue from a lack of sunlight. Hopefully, over time, we will adjust naturally to the often monotone skies of island winters. The saving grace is the fact that there is so much GREEN everywhere. The evergreens, holly, ferns, lichens and mosses are vibrant with chlorophyll year-round. The grass IS greener (in the winter) here. Thank you Mother Nature.
We are both adjusting to having an outhouse for a toilet. We had one in northern Alberta, but it was about 10 steps outside of the moHo. One night, at 4am, feeling groggy and a bit grouchy, I measured how far it was to the toilet: one 12-rung ladder, 15 stairs and 80 footsteps. Then back again. I have already thanked the outhouse for teaching me the magic of accepting so-called "inconvenience". We are so darn spoiled in our modern society. Everything has been designed so that we barely even have to stand up to get what we want. Now, something as simple as a trip to the outhouse is an adventure.
Which leads me to something else. We shamefully purchased some portable plasticky clothes racks to act as a closet in our loft bedroom. We then realized that they were junky and made in China and we returned them and built our own version of a cabin closet using our clothes rod from the moHo and some scrap lumber. It was a close call to giving in to modern conveniences; Buying things pre-made and packaged up all pretty instead of using our intelligence and dexterity to build something from scratch. We felt so accomplished after crafting a closet and a bed frame for our new mattress. I won't recount all of the hiccups and mess-ups but in the end, we loved working in the wood shop and using math and geometry (I know, it's actually useful!) to create useful stuff.
Something else we are getting used to is hanging our laundry to dry all around our cabin. I have had a clothesline in the past, but always fluffed my fresh laundry in the dryer afterward. Another modern luxury. Fluffy towels. Fluff.
The other night, while walking through the dark woods to the outhouse, I heard an eerie but beautiful owl call, over and over. It stopped me in my tracks. It made me smile. I feel so at home being so closely surrounded by the natural world. It's where we all came from not that many generations back.
We spent this afternoon helping to build some additional compost bins to accommodate food scraps and other compostable materials, reducing our "waste" to a very small amount.
We greatly anticipate digging into the raised garden beds. We plan to attend a seed exchange next weekend on another nearby island to collect some local heirloom veggie seeds. Some of the flowering fruit trees are beginning to show tiny pink buds emerging. And another cycle of growth begins...
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