A Bedroom with the Bees

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the return to our land. In part because from August until mid-October, nothing was happening. Sure, I had many things lined up to happen, but all were halted, their activation unknown, like the creatures in the White Queen’s Garden in Narnia, frozen and waiting for Aslan to breathe them into action. I was waiting for the electrician, waiting for conduit to arrive, waiting for the tiny home, which was waiting on steel, drywall, and workers to return from suffering the Covid Delta surge. During this time, I got off coffee, allowing myself one a week, not for health reasons, but because coffee is the gesture of getting things done and my life since the fire has been the opposite, the gesture of things maybe getting done when there’s manpower or supplies to do so. It is in part a life of disappointment, in spite of the best laid plans, and I needed to be open to the state of anything can happen, and this is the gesture of tea.

The conduit arrived, the power turned on, and the hookups finished. Now all we needed was the home. Days and then weeks passed. It was out of the blue, on October 10th, when we got the email that she was shipping out the next day and we’d have her by October 13th, if all went well on the road. My husband and I jumped into action, making sure we really were ready, me clearing my calendar so I could take delivery, now becoming the one suspended in amber. The driver got on the road and made across the Midwest in the first day, texting me pictures as he stopped to sleep. He’d tell me how much attention she was drawing from those passing by; it was practically a non-stop photo shoot. Everything seemed on track until the second day of travel, when I80 closed in both directions due to an accident. This of course set him back several hours, but worse, made it impossible to cross Wyoming before a huge, early blizzard descended.

After the year we’ve been through, it figured that a blizzard would strike. I80 was closed for 24 hours. Irritation brewed deep within like the Bialetti just before percolation, a frustration that had been building for months. I’ve worked so hard to manage the realities of our displacement while also trying to get back home—it’s been my life for a year—and now, when the moment was so close at hand, mother nature yet again had her way. I wanted to bang my head against a wall, or perhaps fall asleep and never wake up. I felt like a kid who’d woken up on Christmas day only to be told it was postponed. Not cancelled, but not happening today. When will we open presents? When Santa decides to arrive, that’s when.

That Friday, the greatest gift did arrive, our tiny home on wheels, aka THOW for those in the know. The driver masterfully navigated her up the mountain and onto our damaged but still functioning driveway, placing her almost exactly where my husband wanted her (Walt will say he was an inch off. I think it’s perfect). Unfortunately, this was the eve of my first weekend of permaculture class, the only real commitment I’ve made since the fire, so I couldn’t spend the weekend giving her a test run, but that night friends came over to see her and our Hoovers initiated the event with a hot tub party. I was in heaven.

Decorating the tiny was so much fun, I don’t need much to make it a home. She came with all the furniture, all I needed were the essentials—plates, pots, knives, linens, and rugs. The next week I created a home—as a homemaker, the nest is my temple—with intention and purpose. As fate would have it, we had to go out of town during the first winter storm, but when we returned, she stood, level and in place, not a leak to be found, even though trees were snapped all around her. She’d passed the first test.

Finally, after fourteen months of exile, I took myself and my bulldog Otis, back to the land, alone, to write. I’ve been writing the whole time since the fire, as these essays can attest, but I haven’t entered the world of fiction since August of 2020. This isn’t because of trauma, but rather the blame can be placed on Covid. We had a cabin that was an Airbnb before Covid struck that turned into my husband’s office over the course of one weekend in early March of 2020. The fire took that cabin along with everything else, and since then my husband has been in the center of every rental, working his ass off by mostly talking, and the rest of us have had to work around him.

My writing space has been in not one, but two closets during this time. Writing fiction requires leaving this world and entering another to find voices not my own. Characters who want me to tell their story. Cities and cultures different than the one I inhabit. To go there is to connect my mind and soul to another dimension and any interruption slams the door shut between the worlds, leaving me gasping as if cut apart from the fabric of life. Writing is an intimate act, almost like taking a lover, one that isn’t shared until the story is done. If you interrupt the writer in your life, know that you are keeping the rest of us from a story we will never hear.

As I settled into the first day of my writer’s retreat in the tiny, I definitely felt the welcoming of the home itself. Tiny living is different. The entire home vibrates when I run the washer and I can feel it sway when my husband gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I can only host four people at most inside, however we have three acres in which to create “rooms” for entertaining. I told my husband we have the biggest house in the world, the tiny home is merely the bedroom and kitchen.

The craftsmanship of this home stuns me. It may be the most beautiful interior I’ve ever lived in. I sometimes feel like I’m living in the TARDIS, it is so much bigger on the inside. The windows provide a view that is changed in its form—many trees have died and gone away—but it is familiar, like an ancient lover from a past life. I know this place, my cells know this place…it is home.

Some say home is where the heart is and my husband says home is where I am, but I wonder if this is true. What if home really is a place? There’s something about this mountain and it’s not just me. Everywhere up here I see people trying to return; water tanks popping up like the grasses after the first rains, RVs, sheds, and workshops rising from the ashes. My friend Sam has built a labyrinth on his land that expresses the very power and beauty of this place and the people who inhabit it. By sunset of my first day here alone, I’d written three chapters of my new novel—a rewrite my publisher has asked for, so not a new story—yet I’d been away from the tale for so long that returning to the characters was like meeting my college girls at a reunion. Damn, I’ve missed them.

Two days on this land and I have written seven chapters as well as this essay. I’ve meditated, sat in the hot tub, and walked the dog in the neighborhood for the first time since the fire. We took hours as he sniffed every inch of the roads and bracken he used to explore daily in his early life. I know he remembers as I remember. As I pack up to go back to Capitola, another place of magic, two things dawn on me. First, that Big Trees is home. Plain and simple. I may have a second home in Capitola until next July, and soon one in Chicago, but Bonny Doon and the Big Trees is where I will always return from my travels. It’s a big world and the nomad I’m becoming longs to explore it, but the land and this tiny home are the basecamp of my life. I can’t wait until we have completed the project with two more units for the boys, then we will all be home again.

The second idea is this realization that perhaps what has been missing since the fire isn’t the quiet space to myself—though lack of privacy is the main reason many stories aren’t told—but rather it has been my muse that’s been missing…this land. My writing has never been so prolific as it has during the California phase of my life. I wonder, are the stories written in the bark of the trees? Carried on the winds from the sea? Traveling through the mycelial network beneath the soil, like data on the internet? What if the land itself is a portal to another world? That would explain why so many love this place. Dooners are Dooners for a reason. The desire to return is strong, even if the cost is prohibitive due to county codes and restrictions. This is an anti-growth state and this mountain is hard to defend as mother nature begins to make her needs known. But the people of the beautiful mountain will return, one way or another.

The tiny home community my husband and I are creating for our family is the way we shall return. This first arrival is a nest unlike any other. I realize we’re in the honeymoon phase and that with time, the limitations of this lifestyle will make themselves known. For now, I’m in heaven, and my soul is filled with love for every person who made this possible.

I am home.