with Amish T leading the way using the official survey, finding the trees and iron spikes right away, because he knows how to read a map, and what’s more, K hobbling with a walking stick twice as fast as us, uphill. K who i learned today maintains his logger license with a permit.  He logs with his Clydesdales, and he will be removing the ash trees. i’m coming back down to watch every minute, and T in his hat and handmade clothes and muck boots, and driver K retired and turns out knows and does everything about land management, and farming, telling me that the wheel grown into the tree on the creek bank is from a one-horse corn planter from the 19-teens.

 scrunchslosh rainy with leaves, wet boots, and mud mud mud. We walked the entire border which took 2 1/2 hours, we hiked with a can of bright pink spray paint, and a 4″ geode that demanded to return to the Seeing table, and so rode in my left pocket like an albatross, and which slammed my left pinky finger when I stumbled, my geode-confined left fist hitting the ground trapped at my hip.  We ambled the line, 30″ walnut to iron spike to double sycamore, to post plenty of no hunting signs and so I can know where to begin freaky installations that harmlessly surprise the trespasser.

Discerning the entire edges of these woods on a walk with the survey plat even though I thought today was going to be about tree removal, it was in fact about understanding the border, where it is, and what’s on the other side of it. and other than a couple problem spots with questionable neighbors, everything is safe and well and gorgeous. I am supposed to come to know it, to understand it, observe it, to be familiar with it. to walk it as a matter of course.

and back inside the house strewn with Christmas flotsam, 6′ tree with 5 strands of lights, hearth and fire, this is a living room now, three feet above the rocky site I staked out four years ago, and how the space became an interior, skin by skin, from thought to visualization, drawing to un-square frame and cinder block footer, barn and haul, repeat, new 2x’s; then plywood, then black paint background for the planned wooden walls, which made the whole structure into a Malevich stage until the next skins of drywall and the colossal barn wood wall, and primer and trim and paint, the room was its own stage for months, saws and stacked planks, the Chinese kitchen cabinets in too early, collecting construction dust, and demoralizing our carpentry.

This whole project aged me, in all the ways, and worse than I imagined it could, with all the psychiatry and financial collapse of Reason until the house pulled itself up like its own socks, layer by layer, my standards for construction driven through the gorgeous barn metal roof, and Amish introduced to me by the land mover i can’t find very well these days for flooding and the flu, we built the house in, all the way to the bead board and the furniture from leftover lumber, design left up to craftsmans’ choice, and delivered as camp style that harkens furniture made for Adirondack cottages, which I have never seen except flickering in the backs of the eyes of family Out East. or no-nonsense Michigan furniture that floated across the lake to sears and speigel warehouses, smelling of turpentine and shellac, and swelling in humid summers so that none of the doors or drawers slide easily.