Have you met Miss Jones?

I can't really explain why I have such an affinity for Bridget Jones.

I don't smoke and I hate the taste of vodka. I like to think my streak of bad judgment with men has come to an end.

Still, something about her mildly defeatist personality, the fact that she never has quite the whole story before she takes drastic action, makes me think it could have just as easily been me falling out of a cab onto the street instead of her.   

And honestly, here, thousands of miles from Bridget's London flat, there are still days when I feel like doing this:  



It's not that I'm really all by myself in the cabin. Andy goes work and I do my thing all day: working, blogging, writing. Andy comes home, we tackle dinner and the dishes and more often than not snuggle up for the nightly Netflix. For the most part, I'm a creature of habit and a structured day after day routine suits me just fine.

There also days when the cabin walls seem to be creeping closer and closer together.
  
I remember how much I longed for this during the crazy summer months: the quiet, the solitude. And there's nothing I regret about spending these winter days typing away at the computer, gazing out on a sparkly winterscape, watching the sun rise in muted apricot hues and set in splendid raspberry skies. I'm safe here, in a calm, static nucleus of a crazy colorful world.

While my friends off getting advanced degrees, engagement rings, marriages, babies, houses, I'm just here in the woods with a steady job, no significant travel plans, and a new retirement fund. Things plod along steady like and secure as can be, yet hardly a day goes by when it doesn't feel like I'm missing something. There's deep inconvenience to this life in the woods, one that makes sharing in others' triumphs difficult and distant. There are times when phone calls with friends just don't cut it.  

Each invitation to an event or celebration means juggling schedules, worrying about weather, and pounding hundreds of miles of pavement. There's no popping over to friend's house for happy hour. Even the Thursday trips into town for trivia have become a thing of the past with our increased distance from town.

It's easy to feel left out.

Yet, I remember the words of Nick Drake's song, "Road": You can take a road that takes you to the stars now. I can take a road that'll see me through.

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Days Off Are Good

Here’s a newsflash for you: days off are good. Alright, not exactly rocket science, but every once in a while, it seems we all need a reminder of the fact. For whatever reason, we like to forget that recharging isn’t an option luxury, it’s a necessary component of everyday life, especially if we’re planning to hang onto our sanity for too terribly long.

Lately days off haven’t been happening around here. As a result, crankiness abounded and everything started to seem like a lot of work. So on Wednesday, after I completed the last phone interview necessary for the August batch of articles, Andy and I decided to take a hike.

Last year, the Forest Service completed a new 3-mile loop trail in the area called the Centennial Trail (last year was the Superior National Forest’s centennial) which follows an abandoned railroad bed from the 1890s and goes past several test pits of an abandoned mine from the same era. In addition, the trail offers a snapshot of the forest fire/blowdown events of the last decade. The interpretative trail is pretty much in our backyard and despite sending several inquiring visitors to our respected work places to go hike the new path, neither Andy nor I had actually hiked the entire trail.

The trail itself isn’t terribly difficult, but it’s awfully interesting. Along the way, there are 14 markers along the pathway which point out unique historical and natural history factoids about this path which goes under where a wooden rail trestle once stood and passes through a 120 year old rock cut. This is the corner of our woods that was, more than a century before, a bustling town of laborers, complete with a brothel. Now, looking at the pathway through scrubby brush, it’s hard to imagine the blind optimism that prompted prospectors to stomach the expense of building a railroad here which would remove only a single load of minerals during its entire life.

Andy peers down into one of the test pits along the trail, where mineral prospectors searched for minerals in the soil. They found iron ore . . .  just not quite as much as they found farther west in the state, on the Iron Range.

The world is filled with all sorts of stories like the story of the Paulson Mine that we learned about on the Centennial Trail on Wednesday. But often, we get so swept up in our own stories that we forget that our lives are drastically enriched, and dare I say, improved by the stories of others. Yesterday – my Monday – I felt inspired and refreshed. In this world of deadlines, lunch breaks, and salaries, we can forget, especially if we’re writers, that the most important thing we can do is keep our ears, eyes, and hearts open to new stories and experiences. If we can remember to do that, every day has the potential to feel like a day off.

Centennial Trail overlook, looking towards Gunflint Lake and showing burn from the Ham Lake Fire and blowdown from 1999.

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Best Intentions Part II . . .

No, no more disgusting pictures of my smoked back. Not to worry, the sunburn will soon be a distant memory when it fades away in about six months. . . .

No, today we discuss what happens when you decide to tap each day for its full potential. Or what doesn’t happen . . . .

Back in the dead of winter last year, when the days were short and dark, the money was scarce, and we lived in 12x20 Shack, I started to say yes to a lot of projects, jobs, assignments, etc. that sounded exciting and fun and just generally a really good idea. Sure I’d have time for it all, I thought. I’d just have to be willing to go full out every single day this summer. (Thank goodness I have no children!)

But lately I haven’t been going full out every day. Instead, it’s felt like I’m running into a wall. I plan to get up early but only succeed in rolling out of bed just as Andy’s hitting the road to work. By then, after the physical therapy exercises are done, breakfast is fixed and lunch is packed, there’s very little time left in my morning before it’s time to start thinking about heading to work. All day at work, I tell myself at night I’ll get the freelance work done. Yet when I get home, it’s generally sounded like more fun to bake a pie or hunker down with a cup of tea and the novel (Haunted Ground by Erin Hart) I’m reading.

Then on Wednesday afternoon, while Andy was off at fire training, I discovered the shelves in our bedroom -- meant to organize all my important papers – looking like this:

Not a single pay stub, bank statement, or anything else had been filed since after I’d gotten home from New York City . . . in April. I filed all the miscellaneous papers draped across the shelves and the printer (which is out of ink). It took all of fifteen minutes. So I decided I’d had enough with not doing what I should be doing just because other things sound like more fun. (The novel I’m reading really is intriguing.)

Last night I stayed up after Andy crashed into bed and wrote a “to-do” list that’s actually broken into bite-sized chunks. I made up an editorial calendar for this blog. (Yes, I’m attempting to semi-focus the “Of Woods and Words” content so the blog can be described, vaguely, as something other than my rambling thoughts.) There are plenty of walls out there for me to run into, but I’m through with this one. No more letting my best intentions get the best of me.

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