Preparing for Polar Air

In a log cabin the logs get chilled all through in deep winter and then radiate cold -- indoors. That's my least favorite part of living here. Then I use my extreme-temp strategies. There's no gym, church, coffeehouse, library, club meeting or anywhere to escape to this year, so:

 

• Wear over-the-knee wool socks and long underwear under fleece-lined sweats, and maybe leg warmers and headgear. Indoors. I do mean it.
• On the weekend, place the closed car or other vehicle in the sun (if there's sun). Let the sun heat it up real good. Go nap in it. Warms your bones.
  
  
• Eat higher-calorie food to sustain body weight. It is not healthy to "get thin" because of cold temperatures.
  
• Curtain or shade all windows, or tablecloth your window, as I did this morning. If possible, tape the curtain's edges to the walls. Science says a curtained window loses 25 to 35 percent less heat. 
• Take vitamins and eat citrus daily. I like water with lemon. Here are lovely honeybells (cross between grapefruit and tangerine. Their skins "unzip" very neatly).
• Make and consume soups and herbal teas and lots of water. That sounds counter-intuitive. It isn't. Single-digit temps and indoor heating bring very dry air, dry air means dry and vulnerable membranes. Intersperse intake of caffeine drinks or alcohol with glasses of water.
  
• Set and patrol mousetraps because furry company is likely to creep in seeking shelter.
• For the duration, forget economizing. Use all resources.
  
• Leave a stream of water running in the slop sink so the pipes won't freeze.
• Exercise will warm cold extremities.
• Find an active, distracting household task: Ironing, long recipes, repairs and alterations, dusting, cleaning the oven or the ceiling fan blades, shoe and boot care, and so on.
• Don't complain or call people to complain that you need spring or summer. Move to Florida if Missouri's too much of a challenge for you.
  

Look Through My Window

The cabin's original windows with original silica glass (single-pane, and it's wavy) look like this, a little scarred, but it's been 80 years and only two are left and there's no greater fun than yanking them open in good weather, yanking hard and maybe even prying with a butter knife, and letting the breeze in to sweeten the room, and thought I'd show you the view in summer:

And just so you don't get too romantic about living in a 1930s log cabin in autumn during a rainstorm:

The leaking problem is largely solved by a piece of thick translucent plastic Demetrius stretched into a wooden frame he custom-built to fit this window from the outside, a homemade storm window, but in the summer I remove it. In autumn when the window leaks--as the weather and precip is increasingly driven in from the north--I set the shield back over the window. Then I must seal every crack in the inside with those rubbery strips of foam or else cold wind whistles through the warpings. Yet it's all worth it. These have to be the coolest, strangest windows on earth.

Yes, these windows should all be repaired and maintained, but the owners don't think the house is worth maintaining. That used to annoy me until I realized what I treasure isn't the INSIDE of the house but the hundred acres it sits on and all comes with it. In the Manhattan penthouse I will someday inhabit, I will never look back on my life and be sorry.

What the Roof Really Looks Like

The roofers, about 8 months after they were promised, came by, pounding and ripping early this morning, and I was happy because my neighbor Terri and I both needed new roofs, seriously. And I saw what the roof looked like beneath the composition shingles. It looks like shingles. Here's what's been sheltering the house all this while (this is probably the 80-year-old decking). The workers sheathed it and applied new shingles. Click the above picture to see the whole thing, including a roofer.

Naturally, because it was foreordained by God from the dawn of time, one of the roofers knocked just after my shower and I answered the door with toweled hair sticking out like Phyllis Diller's, and comforted myself by saying they have surely seen worse. (Any worker who goes house to house will always, if you ask, describe the worst they've seen. It isn't a squinting little woman in pink thermals with wild hair.) They needed a 3-prong electrical socket. There aren't any outside. So I plugged it into the bathroom, and the pounding and roaring was such that I left home for the day.

By 4 p.m. most of the work, as you can see, had been completed except for new shingles over the porch area, and the mess in the yard cleaned up. The first photo shows the old TV antenna still standing, next to the shorter chimney. The antenna is now leaning against a tree in the yard; there is nothing more useless. Terri informed me that the local recyclers aren't accepting metal and glass anymore, only paper and cardboard. Because gasoline is so cheap there's no money to be made from metal and glass recycling. I can probably turn the old antenna into some kind of wild-bird attraction.

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.

Everything and the 10-inch Kitchen Sink

October 1 is my 13th anniversary on the Divine Property, and it's 14 years 2 months if counting subletting from June 1998 to August 1999. (The only place I've moved into twice.) I will never leave this place where the extraordinary happens every day and the rent, plus 99 acres of land and an ideal neighbor, is $502 a month ("as is").

Inconveniences and Oddities:
-Single-pane windows, plus a concrete slab foundation, ensure that the cabin is a freezer in pitiless winters despite every strategy known to humanity.
-If it's humid, the living room carpet -- even though cleaned -- stinks of pee from a cat who died of bladder cancer in 1999.
-!$%&*!$!!! mice, termites, snakes, skinks, spiders, bats, crickets, etc. for roommates.
-Kitchen sink measuring  13" x 10," x 7 inches deep: smaller than a shoebox.
-No bathtub.
-No library serves this location.
-$30 a month trash service.
-A fallen tree on the gravel road means you stay home until the chainsaw guy gets there.
-Bizarre, intermittent wireless service.
-Six miles to the nearest doughnut.

True Loves:
-Shade trees.
-Peace and quiet
-Native stone screened porch with wooden screen door, furnished with picnic table.
-House aligned east and west so equinoctial sunlight shoots through perfectly.
-Bringing and inviting people here.
-Wildlife, flora, and most weather.
-Birds of the day and birds of the night.
-Most amazing neighbors.
-Landlord to call when something's wrong.
-Two-car garage.
-Red flag on the mailbox.
-Wild foods.
-Propane tank. I love the stupid thing and the blue flames it makes.
-Unable to see neighbors but sometimes hear their roosters or fireworks.
-99 acres of meadows and woods
-Conservation areas nearby.
-Well water.
-Gorgeous, vivid moonlight and night sky.

The Old French Trading Post

Toured the private historic site Fort LaCharrette with its proprietor, architectural historian Wheelock Crosby Brown, who showed me around the oldest horizontal-log cabin west of the Mississippi and the fur-trading post founded in 1762 by Frenchman Joseph Chadron and his Osage Indian wife. Lewis and Clark visited Fort LaCharrette, the last white settlement on their way west, in 1804. Brown, a specialist in historic restorations, saved the buildings from ruin and lovingly restored or rebuilt every inch with original materials or as close as he could get. The cabin, trading post and authentic outbuildings perch on a bluff high above the Missouri River near Washington, Mo., and Brown (the bearded guy; degree from Stanford) flies there the old French flag and the 17-star American flag of Lewis and Clark's time. He gives tours, by appointment, to groups or to individuals such as myself. I got to sit in an 18th-century chair hollowed out of a log and upholstered with a blanket, and listen as Brown described the Chadrons' business and home lives. The fireplaces work.

Brown explained that Fort LaCharrette wasn't a military fort. Back then, anyplace people could run for safety and shelter was called a fort. A "charrette" is a wooden wagon (pictured) of the kind that Joseph Chadron filled with furs he bought or bartered from white and Indian trappers, and took down the bluff to a boat and to St. Louis to resell.

Things to remember: "Osage" is from the French "Aux sage," meaning "wise ones." "Missouri" is from the Siouxan, "Ouimisourite," meaning "men of long canoes." Here's another article about Fort LaCharrette.

How I Got to Live Here

A typed 3"x5" file card tacked up on a bulletin board at the university where I worked said a rural rental property was subletting for a year at $400 a month. I'd been living in a low-rent (bullet holes in my windshield) area of St. Louis for a decade and pined for change. I'd also been visualizing my ideal home: in the woods, near a creek, where night looked like night; I'd even taped up a picture cut from Reader's Digest. Given my situation it was a foolish impossible pipe dream. I phoned. A Dutch physics professor and his artist wife about to tour the world for a year said they sought someone clean and neat who'd occupy the house and care for their cat.
I drove 35 miles from town, increasingly enchanted by the hills and greenery. It was April. Found a little white house with green shutters and door, shaded by old hickory and oak trees (at that time I couldn't tell them apart). I glanced through the kitchen window at the porch and fell in love. The original three rooms of the house was a log cabin. Awkward additions had been tacked on. It came with 100 acres of Ozark foothills. My first night here was in June. I had no bed yet. I lay on the bedroom floor on blankets, the windows open wide to hear everything. The house is on a sandstone cliff, so when I looked out I saw starry sky. The cat was a sweet companion.

After 14 months the couple returned. I asked to be informed if they ever moved away so I could ask to be next to rent it. Moved back to the city and two years and two months later, on Oct. 1, 2001, I moved back into the Divine Cabin and they will take me out feet first. In order to stay here I have refused offers of good jobs and marriage. This old, drafty, complicated house requires hiring people to help me out but I'd rather do that than live somewhere with fewer challenges. The gorgeous stone fireplace doesn't work. The moldy, leaky, ugly, 4x8 bathroom (yes, it's the only bathroom) with the rusted hot-water heater got torn out and updated just this past year. (There's still no bathtub.) Nearly every morning from March through late November I have morning coffee or tea on the stone porch. It is my box seat on the universe. In the city, Summer Solstice meant nothing. Here it means everything.

Happy Summer Solstice June 20 at 6:09 p.m. CDT. Please celebrate anytime that life on earth is a peak experience. This is a meadow celebrating itself, across Highway F, not 50 feet from the LaBarque Creek.

A Rare Look Inside the Divine Cabin

Began this blog in June 2007. By now you're wondering, what's her writing space like? Now you know. Welcome. This is the Divine living room. That's a "kneeling chair" that keeps my back straight while I tinker with words, building houses of words, for hours and hours just about every day. A second, faster laptop I take with me onto the porch and move around the house with; they are synchronized.

A Sound You Don't Hear Anymore

Joining the 21st Century

The Divine Cabin has joined the 21st century; thought you'd like to know. Last night I got to watch Kill Bill and then a 1986 Mike Tyson fight. Wow. And that after a 30-mile cruise on the freeway seeing all the fireworks from the all the towns from the city to out-here. And that was after dinner at my favorite Italian place, with good comp'ny.

The True Meaning of Summer

Fishin rods waitin' on my porch, bought last summer by David. Pink for me, blue for him. He's that kind of guy. They're waiting for a good fishing day and for David. I re-did the terminal tackle on all of em using a knot he taught me. Yes, I bait my own hooks, with minnows too.