We Live Here

(Up there amidst the Fir trees is the place we now call home.)

One of these days the kids and I will make colorful signs that say: We live here or Smile you're walking on our driveway.

We will hold our hand drawn signs up for hikers heading towards Tonsina Point or Caines Head when they give us strange looks as we drive past.

Some smile and wave, some glare, some shake their heads, some just stop and stare.

The foot traffic on the state park's easement, that doubles as our driveway, will slow as summer turns to fall, dwindling to the regulars that live here, who will soon realize that we do too, literally, up the hill from Tonsina Trail, where the gravel driveway splits, one path heading down towards the actual trailhead and the other climbing straight up, with the wooden private drive sign that tells hikers: Wrong way.

A lot of folks still miss the sign, and make the climb, only to be greeted by four black and white sheep dogs, herders, ready to round up the confused over-dressed camera-laden tourists and send them back down the mountain. Or maybe its a group of curious locals who just couldn't resist the itch to discover: Whats up there? 

"We basically live in a park," Nick said the other day, as we stood among the Hemlock and Spruce and watched an eagle fly overhead. With a national park stretching 1000's of miles behind us, a sate park one parcel away, and our driveway the start of a popular hiking trail that winds through the woods and down to the beach for a few miles, before reaching an abandoned World War Two fort that overlooks Resurrection Bay, my husband's words ring true.

We live in a park. We live here.

(View of our mountain from across the bay)

Last night I discovered a bag of seed pods, collected from my Anchorage gardens, mysteriously moved from the bench where I left them to the ground a few feet away, Iris, Forget-me Not, Golden Globe scattered on the shrubby grass by our fire pit.

"The birds must have moved the bag," I said to the kids, picturing the Crows or Stellar Jays picking up the small ziplock in their beaks and tossing the seeds about. "Or maybe the squirrels."

"Or a bear," Olive said.

"Or a whale," Elias grinned.

"Or the dragon," I added, referring to David's imaginary basement pet, created years ago, to keep the kids from crawling through the hole under his stairs that acts as an underground dog door.

We gathered the soaked seed pods and walked towards the outhouse, to a compost rich area recently cleared that I'm slowly turning into a perennial garden.

"We can just toss them anywhere and see what happens," I told the kids, and they both eagerly reached for the bag, fisting seeds, flinging their arms out wide. "They might make it, they might not, but we might as well try."

And isn't that all we can do.

Try.

We might make it, we might not.

But my god, I want to try.

I want to try to create the life I imagine up here on this mountainside. I want to write and grow flowers of every color. I want to learn about the native plants, the moss and fungi, the Skunk Cabbage and Devil's Club. I want to explore the mountains and shoreline with my children and Nick to know the land and the sea, not as abstract notions of escape or beauty, but intimately.

"Mom," Olive said as she split apart a brown Iris pod and scattered the small seeds about, "We could be called the nature family. Because we basically live in nature now."

Her acceptance of this change, from a neighborhood flocked with friends, to the wonders of life in the woods, from a girl who didn't want to move, to one who seems so at ease amidst the trees, makes me smile, still, from a place much deeper than her words alone. 

"I want to show you and Elias something." Olive lead us towards the edge of our clearing, to her "work area", where she stuck a dead Spruce branch in the compost of an ancient felled Hemlock tree, on the edge of our cliff that drops down to the start of the trail.

"See what I planted," she says with a proud smile, "I think its growing."

Seeds, faith, and the willingness to try, its all we really need.

And yes, we actually live here.

(Our driveway.)

Comments

[Kristen H]

Wonderful! What a restorative place you've chosen to make your home. Bravo!

[Christy]

It still feels like such a gift, even tonight with torrential rain falling on the trailer roof, I am still thinking in awe, I get to live here...