As we pack up to leave Seward, after a week spent exploring our soon-to-be-new-home, Olive says: "I don't want to move."
Her words catch me off guard, like a sudden storm cloud on a sunny evening.
Sure this has been her constant refrain back in Anchorage, especially after playing with our neighbor Grace, a girl she's known since birth who lives two doors down. Our first day is Seward she said, "Mom, I don't want to stay here. I want to go back to Anchorage to play with Grace."
But that was seven days ago.
Before four days at camp with Seward children, the first day of which she said I came too early when I arrived at 5:00 to pick her up after a full day of park and playground play.
Before hours spent playing in the woods turning logs into alligators, a brush pile into a nest, and moss into hair.
Before beach walks and fire pits and playing on the roof with her new buddy Laif.
Laif lives down the mountain from us. And he just finished kindergarten too. And he is Olive's first true friend in Seward. When they weren't sword fighting on the shed roof, they lay across the pitch and talked about what they saw in the clouds.
And here's what I love about life on the mountain, surrounded by trees, endless trees: this bounty of creativity the woods provide.
In this picture, Olive set up her desk at the school where she works as the art teacher, currently offering a class on how to make wooden knifes:
I earned the role of garden teacher. Nick P.E., where they were learning how to build things.
And Elias wore the title of Principal, who just had to sit on a big log and watch everyone. A Principal who occasionally pulled pieces off the fallen giant, a mighty Hemlock, horizontal so long its once hard bark was more mulch than shield, and he threw the wooden shards for the dogs.
On another day, as I clip Devil's Club and Alders to clear a path for my boy to reach a standing dead tree, what he calls "breakers", he says, "Mom, its like we're breaking open the woods!"
Breaking open the woods.
This we are, this family of mine.
Literally clearing land and claiming a place in the heart of it all as our own.
Our home. This land speaks to me as no place before.
And feels like my "forever home", a term Elias learned in one of his HTV home shows and loves to bring into our dialogues.
"Mom, what if the trailer is our forever home?"
"Not the trailer Bud, but the land."
"But what if we lived in the trailer forever?"
"It would get small."
"Would you get claustrophobic?" He loves this word and says it with excitement, as if its a good funny feeling.
Starting to feel cramped in already, I answer: "You know I would."
"Mom, we're going to live in the trailer!"
"Yep."
"Can you believe we're going to live in the trailer?!"
At this point in the conversation, I want to get the fuck out of the trailer.
How the hell are we going to do this? I think on the first day, as we try to put things away in our 30 feet of space.
And yet as the outside hours fall into each other, with pine needles in my hair and composted forest beneath my finger nails, I stop worrying about the container that will hold our things; instead I let the embrace of mountains, and sea, and a thousand trees, hold me and within the endless arms of wilderness, our space feels limitless.
We can do it.
Its what I want. Its what Nick wants.
Elias seems excited.
And then there's Olive, saying on our final day, as we pack up the trailer to return to Anchorage: "I don't want to move."
Before I can even grasp a collection of words to respond, Olive continues: "Seward is the best."
(This is a picture of the mountain we will live on taken from the other side of the bay. And because its Alaska, with countless mountains, as far as we know it does not yet have an official name.)
Wonderful.. I have been following you for year, you tell a great story. I am happy that you have included us in thip as well
Nancy
Posted by: Nancy Woeldile | 06/07/2016 at 08:59 PM