*yawn*

Is it possible to relish a boring life? For weeks now, I’ve considered making updates here, only to shrug helplessly: what can I say? The moments that make up my day to day existence are small and simple, and while it would be possible to write stories about them and expand them into epic adventures, why? The beauty of each day is that it goes on, quietly, calmly, without fanfare or grandeur or the need to create such. The cats wake me up at 6:30 every morning. Cricket climbs quietly onto the end of the bed and sits expectantly while her brother Jasper crawls under my sleeping bag with me and licks my face until I either kick him out or get up to feed them. My body’s accustomed to the early rising. Even on weekends it’s difficult to sleep past seven. Still, I enjoy the motions of sleepiness: squinting at the brightness, grumbling silently at the injustice of the freezing bathroom floor. Bob’s always awake before I am, and I blink hazily at him and croak out a good morning while I put on the water for tea. Mornings, I feign solar-poweredness. I curl up on the front porch in my usual chair and hold my blue tin cup close to my chest, soaking up its warmth as I read and wait for the sun to animate me.

Work commences at eight, when the sun climbs from behind the trees and shines in our eyes. We’re nearing the end of the renovation! The railing has been built. The stairs have new stringers and have been sanded and refinished. I’ve patched holes in the kitchen floor, scraped it clean of old vinyl and cardboard backing, and laid down sheets of plywood to create a solid base for the new vinyl, which we’ll be installing sometime next week. We replaced all ten windows in a two-day marathon, tearing out the old, warped frames and panes with flat bars before fitting in the new. Two more days saw us perched outside on ladders with chisels and mallets, carving out the old logs to fit in new cedar trim, and presently we’re working on building window sills and frames inside. I did all of the work on two of the window frames all by myself! I built the frame for my own room out of smooth, aromatic cedar, and then engineered a rustic-looking structure out of old, weathered barn wood for a second bedroom. Bob wrote me a report card for my window frame work – my first independent construction project! “Windows: A+”, the card read. I found an old magnet and stuck it on the fridge. I am getting the hang of this carpentry thing. I’m not allowed to use the table saw, and I am hopeless at the quick figuring of measurements, fractions, and anything math-based, but my pencil and my tape measure have become new, indispensable appendages, and my arm muscles are becoming stronger and steadier with each blow of the hammer or swing of the mallet. My days are made up of foam insulation, wooden shims, joint compound, caulking guns, sand paper and nail guns. My life is construction and creation.

It is boring. And yet – good. For the first time since I can remember, I have time. I read (Vonnegut, Les Miserables, Baudelaire, Bill Bryson, the final Harry Potter book), I write emails, I write for myself. I’m cooking and baking: pita bread, chili, falafel, biscuits, pizza, corn bread, fried rice, curry. Bob and I are still working with the horses, though now we’re riding and training and spend two or three hours with them every night. Cal comes by in the evenings once or twice a week with a bottle of wine. To write it in detail would become quickly redundant. I could describe to you the hundreds of subtle variations of the light as it plays on the steep red sides of the canyon, or the way that storm clouds build, a bluish-black backdrop to the golden, waving grass in the field. The way the wind blows every afternoon at a certain time or the ongoing war I’ve waged against the mice in the house. There are a thousand small details to flesh out the life I’m leading, but to focus on them with deep description or attention would be to negate the unassuming charm that makes them magic. Every day is an adventure, true, but it’s a smaller, more subtle adventure. It is the adventure of a settled, unremarkable life: worthy, wonderful, but hardly cinematic or inspiring. If there is inspiration to be had, it is in learning to love the simplicity and to exist without the need to invent excitement or chaos or distraction: peace.