Shadows in and out

I got to standing outside under the trees in front of the cabin today. I remembered how, when it was getting built, a friend who had a cabin of her own came over and said “The one thing I’d recommend is cutting those trees back before you get going on it. It’s a pain in the neck to have to do it later.” Five years later, well, I mean to tell you, it’s really cool out here. I went in for the camera to get a picture of the shadows on her but the darn thing was out of juice. I plugged the battery in for about two minutes, checked if the shadows were still there, unplugged the battery… thinking, all I need is thirty seconds. The camera turned on, tantalizingly close, and then turned back off.

The shadows were about as perfect as they could get – like a reflection of what I was seeing when I stopped on my way in and looked up – but then again not really. The shadows were like a painting of ivy and tendrils where looking up it’s a mass…so much it blurs together. The shadow…oh, no, only each one distinctly.

The cabin now appears to have been here all along; the woods to have grown up around us. When I look up, the feeling comes for the impossibility it would now be to plop the cabin down where it is. We are surrounded. She is canopied. “They” were here first, but she and I feel as rooted now as everything else.

You could feel, at this time of year, really embraced, or just about choked out. Confined or liberated or both at the same time. I was reading this book review the other day and the writer described the book as inspiring and devastating. It is like that out here, and my soul knows it. And I keep coming back for it.