Oh My. What a time it’s been. One week after our arrival, I am now solo in this house. Sweetheart has gone back to Brooklyn to work and I’m here with the woodstove (which I am learning to master, stoking and banking with purposeful and beautiful and ancient tools, waking up to a bed of coals still gleaming after the long night) and the cat (whom no one will master, especially not Buster, who he met for the first time yesterday). In the intervening seven days, we settled, nested, unpacked, corralled, toasted with funky local cider and fancy champagne, cooked up a storm, danced in the kitchen, and in the midst of it all, hosted 18 people for Thanksgiving dinner. Hooo-eee! Sweet Family, together again, bringing laughter, stories, recipes, and a plant raised from clippings from the one my Great Grandmaw always kept in her kitchen, to be kept now in mine. Dear friends bringing pink bubbles and aprons and trout-sent-by-mail and the best dishwashing hands I’ve ever seen and smoked ducks and jars of apple pie moonshine and mandolins. And Loves, bearing burdens and brunts and just now taking a deep woodsmokey breath and settling down here in the dusky twilight, the night coming on cold and clear through the bare trees, the sun setting over our darkening field, our little house a bright jewel on the hill.
Such a wealth of thanks. So much heart full and deep and almost beyond words. Home. And just like the third and final page of the localist paper: news, recipes, and crop reports to come.
Feather By Feather 