Recovering From Wildfire – Page 3

Early Light

Published on May 30, 2018March 27, 2019 by Jen9 Comments

jenjoycedesign© light & shadow 2 — Large patches of trees not burned in their crowns, giving a flooding sense of hope.

This morning as I was taking pen into hand to write my morning journal entry, I noticed a warm orange glow cast from the sunrise, and giving an intense beauty into the forest. Early morning light sure does give me perspective, and so I grabbed my camera and just looked about.

jenjoycedesign© light & shadow 1.JPG

My life hasn’t felt very photogenic lately, so capturing these images suddenly lifts me a little. It seems always less the subject, and nearly all the light, which makes or breaks a photograph. And as I have been feeling so overwhelmed with being uprooted during this crazy shuffling about, now seven & 1/2 months since the wildfire, this morning’s sunrise brings a delicate understanding of how both expectation & impatience are troubling me.

As I write this a very big and ominously black raven lands just outside the picture window, on the roof of the little shed next to Tiny House, and seems to be inspecting something. I love the ravens, I am so happy they weren’t away long. The wildlife is indeed more scarce since the fire, but seems to be slowly populating this lonely wood. I have felt thrown out of synchronization with the wild for what is half a year before we moved our Tiny House up here, and I realize this morning that I missed out on a full half rotation around the sun, from 10th of October last year to the 1st of May, being away from this place. That is a long time for a hermit (merely a soft kind word for agoraphobic) . I must just … b r e a t h e….. now back up on the mountain. Breathe it in! This month of May has been such work learning to live and operate inside of a small space. A really small space, and still doing without so much that makes the experience more like camping … as though my ‘real life’ is still on hold.

But life is not on hold, must forget how life once seemed, and open my eyes to the reality of being here, and now, and this could be as good as it gets. Still , my knitting design which has been seriously ergonomically tampered with, nothing in a neat orderly space, but in boxes, here and there, is going to hibernate a spell while we go through more harrowing experience with the demands of the county, which in the end may prove an ironic and impossible situation for rebuilding.

I strive to be happy for what I have. Namely, my charcoal forest, and sense of place…. the ones I love, and this Tiny House. I guess I just need more time, figuring my way forward, thinking about what matters. Life is so short, and I feel each day which slips by that even the rhythm of work of my knitting design has become distortingly hazy. I find I am caught in a sort of reflection of life up to the fire, and am wanting to set in motion the way forward, but frozen peering into that reflection.

jenjoycedesign© reflection — Early morning reflection from window of tiny house.

Life is difficult often, but good, and everything in its place.

Our Tiny House

Published on May 17, 2018April 12, 2025 by Jen47 Comments

Greetings from our Tiny House in the Charcoal Forest!

Our Tiny House arrived here at the beginning of May, and now we have fully nested back in our charcoal forest. It was a major ordeal hauling it up the mountain with low branches over the roads, and a colossal stress, but things have calmed down now and we are getting use to two people and one large dog in a place that is very small. Our tiny house has frightfully few drawers, or closets, but very nice walls, surfaces, fixtures, and huge windows. It is tidy, efficient, artful, and crazy cozy! I even have plenty of blithe sunny angles to contemplate …

We’ve managed to get the bare essentials in as best as we could. Jeff made a counter extension into the stair landing so that there is a tiny bit more kitchen counter and a couple shelves for necessaries (ahem, those “drawers” in front of the sink, they’re fake, a tease, just for looks, but no complaints about the deep sink!) , and we still need to put up some shelves and cup hooks and such. There are two lofts, one with stairs going up to a platform with a just-shy-of 5 foot overhead, it is our bedroom & has room enough only for our mattress ( restorative naps like from a nest in the trees !) and the other loft has a steep ladder going up, over the bathroom, with about 4 feet overhead and which serves as an attic. The saving grace is that Jeff built a shed, which is about 25 feet from the Tiny House, and where we have the luxury of temporary storage, all of our clothes, chairs & dressers I collected in last 6 months, and boxes etc… and… a washer & dryer which will be moved to the house when it is built one day. So that’s me trotting back and forth countless times a day, and with my knitting trail right at the doorstep, and all the wildness I am in need of ~~ ho hum, I tell you, this is “glamping” !

The outside paneling is torched & sealed wood , a method called shou sugi ban , which apparently has excellent preserving qualities, as well as fits right in with the charcoal forest ! Hunkering down for the long haul now, until our former house is rebuilt.

Knitting as usual…

And napping…

I’m so grateful that our Tiny House has super efficient heating & cooling, and will especially when it warms up to scorching temperatures this summer. I can close all the windows up and it becomes nearly sound proof, which is helping me cope with the loud noise of chain saws and bulldozers from the loggers at work – very closely -nearby, and eventually the construction of the house. Eventually. Once in a while a huge tree lands with a thud and shakes the Tiny House, but here inside we are safe and far enough away not to be bothered too awfully much, just rattled. Still trying to find my former manic wave, while adapting to the big changes going on, but I wanted to post this for our friends and family who have been wondering how our new living situation is since the wildfire, now almost six months ago. We’re moved back up on the mountain now, that’s us. Here. Now.

Everything in its place, and life is good.

♣ ♣ ♣

In closing, I just wanted to say that I’d love to hear more from you. I want to encourage some chattiness (plenty of space in the WordPress comments)…so please don’t be shy, and tell me about you!

From within a garden gate…

Published on March 31, 2018November 9, 2022 by Jen17 Comments

I am hopeful and ready to cultivate something verdant and lush, a wonderful secret garden, a tonic for a feeling of well-being and happiness wherein the garden fence I can be a caretaker of living things and feel at home, a place out under the sky where the nameless meadowy wild flowers and grasses thrive along side vines of berries, succulent sedums, herbs, foxglove, sturdy fruit trees. All together keeping time of the seasons together under the showers, and the comforting shade skips around in a merry frolic with the suns rays. In wet months miners lettuce explodes in edible clusters, and somewhere near, maybe a lucky mushroom pops up…

“Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” A. A. Milne

Foraging about in a garden, a secret garden, the kind only a few people visit (namely myself) … with a lovely and nice gate to keep the world out and the magic in. Garden gates utterly fascinate me right now. Here is our garden gate from five years ago . . .

The garden is like a favorite room in a house. In mornings of April through October there’s me holding a watering hose in one hand and cup of coffee in the other, with knitting bag slung across my shoulders. I am dreaming a thriving green oasis from within my Charcoal Forest, and garden with walls of pink jasmine (just planted, six plants!) to vine and cover the lower fence, and shield from vision the blackest of burn, and the apple trees trying to shake off the scorched leaves of last Autumn’s wildfire as their new leaves are determined to emerge soon, very soon, they must, because I just see them in my mind!

“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” Sigmund Freud

A place to go, to work hard and get dirt beneath my nails, a place where the soul meets life, and the worries of the world are forgotten. My thoughts these days are of knitting, and of a garden with knitting trail made new.

blue things

Published on March 14, 2018March 12, 2019 by Jen10 Comments

jenjoycedesign© cappuccino and knitting
In the last weeks I’ve been frequently knitting at the Oakville Grocery cafe to quell life’s blues. Just a quiet little deli & espresso place on the highway with vineyard views in all directions, and with picnic benches in the back where I can bathe in the morning winter sun while making progress toward the finish of a new pattern. And Emma and I are getting out a little bit for (mostly short) walks on the ridge.

Although it appears the walk up the ridge has lost it’s charm completely, I am trying to embrace it, hoping for better days ahead and the mysterious healing power of Spring. Other blues: An intensely blue sky over Oakville on Sunday. A blue balloon descended from the sky, tangled in the woods, omen-like. My blue knitting bag hung on a burned branch while walking up the ridge. Need I mention the blue knitting with cappuccino? I would like to see some blue wildflowers soon. Oh but hey, the vernal equinox is only a week away!

The Textiles of Cusco

Published on February 26, 2018September 22, 2024 by Jen14 Comments

Home-banner-2 — Traditional Textiles of Cusco

What do you get when you bring together a remote and rugged high mountain range, herds of soft downy llamas, alpacas, sheep, and an indigenous people who’s thirst for artfulness is apparent in all they do? You get beautiful textiles steeped in ancient traditional, as in the Cusco region of Peru!

I’ve been watching this video over and over, fascinated in the weavings of the Cusco region, and life’s work of Nilda Callañaup Alvarez , while I knit and think about All Things Peruvian. So much that I’m feeling a deep inward shift in this direction. But that is all for now, more to come later.

♥ ♥ ♥

I have a few designs which were influenced directly from Andean culture . . .

Sol Inca

Camino Inca Chullo

Camino Inca Ponchito

♥ ♥ ♥

News: I am happy to say that we got the quote from the building contractors, and we’ll manage to build our house again! We will have to do some of the finish work ourselves, like flooring, and who knows what else, but that is nothing like when we built the whole house before. The timeline of starting date is still unknown, as is an estimated time of finish, and I suppose everything is getting queued up for a fast and furious build sometime this upcoming spring. I find it so difficult to blindly wait without knowing when I will go back home. Anyway, the very best-case scenario, if everything goes well, and which I am visualizing for dear life, is that we could very possibly be moving back into our rebuilt house this … coming … Autumn … ?