Cabin Notes: a space to call one's own
October 2, 2024
It was stormy, a light drizzle and an intermittent wind, and I walked out of the forest into our open valley. There is the occasional tree in the valley, planted around the houses long ago when they were built, but otherwise, it’s clear. I was sugarfooting down the steep dirt drive, letting each foot take purchase, when I noticed the leaf. Not a leaf, but the leaf, because this leaf was special. In the open, from high, high above, taller than any tree even grows, I watched it flutter down to the ground. I watched for a good thirty seconds as this leaf fell from the treeless sky, for all its quaking (it was an aspen leaf after all) it fell more or less straight down from seemingly nowhere. Of course it fell from a talon that had taken it on a ride and of course it fell after being carried on just the right wind before being tossed aside and of course there was a logical reason this singular leaf fell from the clouds where it did not belong, but it didn’t make it feel any less extraordinary to watch a single leaf fall from the open sky. I watched it fall all the way to the dirt, where it sat there gleaming yellow among rocks and pebbles, a lone leaf on the ground. I picked it up, looked at it, and looked up. Nothing up there, as suspected.
This was an extraordinary leaf, and I should treat it as such.
So I did. I brought it inside, and now it’s sitting on our kitchen counter as a reminder: a leaf can come from anywhere.
The Log
I actually had a little laugh reading this Signs of Colon Cancer in Young People article because it’s basically all the symptoms of being a new mom. How fun. TMI? No. NEI. Never Enough Information.
Bonne Maman has released their 2024 advent calendar, and I just can’t recommend it enough if you love tiny packaging and jam. It is an actual delight. We use the tiny mason jars as shot glasses and if that isn’t cabincore, I don’t know what is.
I love articles titled “These 8 skills can help boost mood and reduce anxiety” because it’s wild to me they still get written because that means people still think there might be some trick they don’t know. But the first item stood out to me because I’ve been working on it for some time now: Switch your focus to something good. In my daydreaming, I often find myself winning some clever made up argument. But why am I daydreaming about arguments? Why am I fantasizing about putting some speeding stranger in their place when I could be thinking about… oh, anything else? So now, when I notice my daydreams have taken on an antagonistic tone, I change them — entirely. I whisk myself off to winning an award or rescuing someone from the backcountry or seeing my novel in print. And it feels better!
Great background watching: the first season of Northern Exposure on Prime
The Chop
It’s list-making season over at the cabin. October typically brings the first snowfall down here at 10k, and I like to prepare for the winter ahead before that happens. That means chopping wood, cleaning up the yard, organizing and wintering the covered patio, etc. We’ve got a long list of things to tick off, and this year we created that list together.
Our house is now operating on a shared Note, ranked in order of importance, urgency, and ease. To me, there is only one real thing on this list: my office. With a barking dog, tussling cats, and a chatty baby, I need a space where the door closes that is not also a bedroom.
Here’s how my office currently looks in our upstairs loft:
Not wildly conducive having that hideous baby swing right there, as you can imagine.
Here is my loose vision for how it could look:
What’s not illustrated above is how we separate the office, which is by building a pony wall topped with windows under that front beam.
And here’s the dream version where we’re multimillionaires and can afford to have this kind of window renovation done professionally:
My fantasy was to have warehouse windows act as the wall, but they’re expensive, and we’d need to have them custom built to fit the odd space. So instead, we’re going to do something like this fake warehouse window with a pony wall. I imagine this project will start sometime in November or December, since we’re in the planning phase now. I truly cannot wait to share it.
The Stack
One thing that stood out to me in Ben Goldfarb’s writing practice that I linked above is his separation of the Church and State of his writing. He has a small office in his house and a small shack out back. He uses the office inside the house (close to the router) to send emails, hold Zoom meetings, post on various platforms, etc., and he uses the shack outside to do deep writing — or at least this is what he attempts to do.
Right now, I have three workspaces: my actual beautiful desk in our open loft area, an IKEA desk shoved in the baby’s room so I can tappity tap while he nappity naps, and the kitchen bar counter where I’m typing this because just kidding! the baby does not nap in his crib. He naps on me in his carrier but only if I am standing. So I am standing at the bar typing.
I don’t think it’s realistic for me to actually move about these three spaces for different types of work right now, given the baby. But one thing I can do is prepare them so that when I’m ready, they are too.
These are my non-negotiables for the perfect workspace:
A coaster. You better believe there’s a nice coaster on my shitty IKEA desk. I love that my drink has its own place. It makes things feel very in order, and boy howdy do I need things to feel in order to write.
Candles or incense or palo santo. There is simply nothing like lighting something on fire to also light your own fire. It’s symbolic, it’s aromatherapy, it’s pyro.
Something cozy. There’s gotta be a blanket handy. I cannot be running off from a good sentence because the chill has taken me.
Chargers. For headphones and computers, but not for phones. Let the phone die.
A good book. Sometimes, in order to get my brain working, I just need to be in someone else’s working brain. It’s like having someone push the car to get it moving. I can just read a couple paragraphs and I’ll be like, “oh I remember how words work.”
So this week, I’m curating my spaces for the season ahead.
Related: What We Really Want is That Room by
How do you curate your special thinking places?
A woman, who can pause to watch a lone leaf drift down to earth, and, then, in wonder, brings it home to honor, she is going to be one fantastic mom in teaching a young boy about the wonders of this world. Lucky Woods!🍁
That future office space looks lovely!