Happy 15th Anniversary

Today, October 1, I've lived on the Divine Property for 15 consecutive years. So much has gone on here, from deadly despair to stellar ecstasy. But it's trending toward ecstasy. Especially when the sun sets early these days and I enjoy an evening on the porch on my pillowed lounge chair alongside an oil lamp and a pink-camouflage wineglass filled and refilled with Three-Buck-Chuck Chardonnay, 2011. After several years of avoiding my Three-Buck-Chuck I reached the rock-bottom of my wine pile and had nothing else to drink. Aging has improved it! I could say that about a lot of things. Don't laugh at the pillowcase. I bet you too have pillowcases from the days your taste was different. Oh--you were laughing at the wineglass? It makes me laugh, too.

My biker brother-in-law (everybody has one!) collects oil lamps, and I got this one.

I'd envy me something awful if I wasn't me.

Meet My Fireplace

Picturesque, its native stone dominating the living room, I've never shown you my fireplace because it doesn't cross my mind. Last lighted in 1991 as testified by the tenants before me, it blasted hot soot throughout the cabin,

requiring an actual disaster team for clean-up, and the charring underneath the mantel from that hot mess is still visible today.

Estimate for re-lining and repair: $8000, and the landlord wouldn't pay, or for the cost of running and installing a new propane pipe for a gas fire. Because critters came down the chimney and died behind the glassed-in hearth--here covered by a blue wintertime sheet of custom-cut insulation--I had the chimney sealed. The huge crack up the front was there when I moved in, and I shuddered in its draft for 13 winters, until this very day when I caulked it with caulk that's white when first applied but turns transparent. I also filled holes in the native rock, unworried about resale value. This cabin was not built for year-round occupancy and some say the chimney was faulty from the first.

Fireplaces are wonderful, so romantic--and they suck the heat out of the room, require careful maintenance and tending and the bringing in of wood, and I wish mine were the fireplace it aspired to be, but it isn't.

CabinHenge

Builders of the Divine Cabin, c. 1930, faced the kitchen door exactly east, so at the Equinoxes I get this phenomenon soon after sunrise: a beam that travels from the kitchen door through the dining room (not shown) through the living room, all the way through to the bedroom (beyond the door). They probably weren't pagans--what they were was careful. I don't know if builders today care as much or have this much liberty, but I do know the builders were thoughtful. Thank you, builders, for your gift to the future, a gift that keeps on giving.