Stick by stick

A love story for my third canvas tent home

**If folks are interested in more of the details of how we are starting the homestead, including stuff like exactly how we are setting up the wall tent permanently, how we built the platform and porch, etc, please let me know! I want these things to be accessible, especially to single women who want to live this way, and I’d be happy to write more about it all.**

I’ve always had a big bull elk skull hanging from my tent porch. He’s a beautiful guy whose antler got broken when the hunters drug him out of the bush, so when they brought him into the shop for me to skin, they didn’t want his head. When I decapitate animals, I only use a knife at the axis joint, so there is a perfect eyeball shaped hole into the brain cavity, which is handy for getting brains out for brain-tanning without cracking the skull. It is a Memory House.

In the spring the little buzzing wrens come around, trying to build nests in everything. I went to put on my jacket one day, and they had started building a nest in my sleeve hole. It is a vigorous time for them, all flight and flit, litanies of song and siren trilling on and on. After I sorrowfully knocked out the sleeve nest, they chose the brain cavity of the elk skull to build in, which delighted me. The little brown lady would hang at the entrance, which was the base of the skull, where the spinal column would attach, and her husband would zap and zoom, desperately bringing her sticks, which she would take from him in her beak, and either dip inside to weave into their home, or she would fling to the ground, chirping wildly with sass and pizazz as he zipped off to fetch another. It was a beautiful thing, the building of a life together inside the memories of the dead.

I’m bursting with wren-ness. We have been cutting and moving logs by hand, making different piles for different projects, clearing brush and slash. We had an excavator come and dig out the stumps for our home site, gravel come in big truckloads for the road. Now we’ve been bringing in other sticks from milled lumber, trees who grew and were harvested from places I don't know, to build a platform for the tent to live on. Wren-ing all over the place.