One Year and Many Miles Later...

I started this blog last year and apparently made my last post on October 4. Well, it's October 24 plus twelve months now, and I'm back.

In this past year, my husband and I have moved from a too-crowded townhouse in too-crowded West Seattle to a larger house in the slightly less dense suburb of Issaquah. Having grown up on several hundred acres of rolling prairie, I was feeling distinctly crowded. I had no garden to speak of. Living things were crowded in like refugees in makeshift boats. I kept a worm bin on the second-floor balcony, two cats, and lots and lots of potted plants that were a small comfort, but nothing like the soul-scrubbing act of tending one's own garden, one's own land.

Seattle's a fairly green city, but still a city for all of that. We all huddle around our small green fires and dream of conflagration.

In those last few years in West Sea, I stopped writing almost entirely, and even my art felt like it wasn't my own. My husband's commute was more than an hour, even with mass transit, and we were both fed up...so, the house-selling and house-buying circus happened, and here we are.

We now live on nearly three acres of wooded forest backed onto a wilderness-preserve state park. I haven't worked this hard in years. I feel like a really grubby superhero, the kind who makes landscape and permaculture and wild design things happen...okay, a superhero would make it all happen faster and wouldn't require as many Epsom salt soaks, but it's something like that.





Ironically, my last post was about the reawakening of my love of drawing. I didn't really start again until we moved in here, and now I've been drawing like mad. I've always loved trees, particularly the sculptural and textural qualities of bark, and there's just something about old tree stumps. I've been trekking out into my woods (my woods!) and finding stumps and interesting downed logs to draw. I'm drawn to those with new trees growing right out of them, new roots entwining the old wood, now crumbling to fertile decay.

When my hands aren't too cramped from either digging or drawing, I'll type more. It's a promise.