on the mend

Today marks two months since the tree fell on my cabin. Two months of wonderful friends like B1&B2, Mummy Dearest and Family, M&N and Family--all absorbing me into their lives even more; giving me a bed and a room of my own in each place. Each place is unique: my room at B1&B2's a quiet guest room which they've given over to me; drawers now stuffed with my things, half a closet taken by me; a bed that the cat Mabel occasionally naps on, next to me. Mummy Dearest has given over her daughter M's bedroom to me. Large, curtained windows which I pull back at night so that I may see the first rays of the dawn when I wake early, even before the kids across the hall. At M&N's I sleep with Bob Dylan--or at least see a poster of him before I fall asleep, which on occasion leads me humming a Dylan diddy while I read in bed. I love that at the two latter houses when I sleep over on my weekend the kids are glad to see me when I wake, enjoying that we've all had a big sleepover. I have been truly blessed with my friends.


And today, two months since the tree fell, it was somehow fitting that I was pulled outside by Sierra to see men working on my little cabin in the woods; examining my room, making sounds that sounded official and hopeful. I am not getting my hopes up yet, but I think things are under way! 


It also felt fitting that my dearest friend Kuz (a teacher from high school who has become like family to me over the nearly 20 years since we first met) made mention of the poem "Mending wall," by Robert Frost. There is a cyclical feeling to spring--the rebuilding of things in nature--and hopefully the mending of my cabin too. 


"Mending Wall"
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 
And spills the upper boulders in the sun; 
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
The workof hunters is another thing: 
I have come after them and made repair 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone, 
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; 
And on a day we meet to walk the line 
And set the wall between us once again. 
We keep the wall between us as we go. 
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
We have to use a spell to make them balance: 
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" 
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
Oh, just another kind of out-door game, 
One on a side. It comes to little more: 
There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours." 
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
If I could put a notion in his head: 
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it 
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, 
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 
He said it for himself. I see him there 
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, 
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 
He will not go behind his father's saying, 
And he likes having thought of it so well 
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours." 
-- Robert Frost