New Year’s Resolutions

“I should have learned how to ice skate at some point,” Rivi says. “I’m sure I would have been a graceful gazelle on them.” “Plenty of ice gazelles in Maine,” I say. “You have to watch out for them when you’re driving at night. Totally wreck your car if you hit one.” We are standing out on the ice of a pond near the house where Hunter and I live, watching some people in the distance ice fishing. The pond is big, what I would have called a lake in the days before I moved here, when I didn’t know…

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Black-Eyed Peas

“Happy New Year,” Viola says from the other end of the phone line. “I thought about calling you at midnight, but I figured you’d be asleep.” “Midnight my time, or yours?” I ask. Viola is in San Francisco, on the other side of the country from me. “Oh, mine, definitely.” “Yeah, my ringer is definitely off at three in the morning.” “I figured,” she says. “Thought that as long as I got you on the first day of the year, that was an acceptable alternative.” “Well, I appreciate the call either way,” I say. “It’s the least I could do,…

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The Donner Party

A snowy white landscape with a solitary leafless tree against a white sky

“What do you do around here for fun?” Rivi asks. “Sitting on the porch in Adirondacks during a snowstorm isn’t your idea of fun?” I say. “I mean, it’s nice,” she says, “but it’s not really exciting.” “You don’t move here for excitement,” Tina says. “You move here for the quiet.” “And the coyotes,” Hunter adds. “And the stars,” Boone says. “I noticed that last night.” I nod. “Yeah, you haven’t seen a night sky until you live where there are no streetlights. You should have been here during some of the auroras. That was some pretty impressive nature, I…

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Rivi, Destroyer of Worlds

“You should really do something with all this art, Sebastian,” Rivi says. “There’s so much of it.” She has been flipping through my virtual portfolio on my laptop, without asking permission first, of course. She’s more of an “act first, apologize never” sort of person, really. “I am doing something with it,” I say. “I’m keeping it on a hard drive and letting it age gracefully.” She grabs a throw pillow off the couch and does exactly that with it: throws it at me. “Don’t be a dip,” she says. “Do something with it. Put it on your blog.” “I…

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A Feral Princess

Close-up of a tarnished doorknob set in a door covered in peeling paint, and bits of rusted metal. It is an old and weathered door.

I am supposed to not know that Rivi, Boone, and Tina are coming to pay us a visit in our house in the woods, and so when I open the front door to them after they knock and the dog barks the arrival of someone at the porch, I make sure that I am wearing my most authentic surprised face. “That’s a bullshit look if I ever saw one,” Rivi says. “Somebody told you we were coming.” “Shut up and hug me,” I say, wrapping her in an embrace. “It’s still bullshit,” she says. “It was Tina, wasn’t it? Boone…

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Surprises

Several teardrop-shaped lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. More bulbs are in the background, out of focus.

Our power flickers at the same time my phone rings. I choose not to see it as some sort of omen. Out here in the woods, the first thoughts tend to lean in that direction, and it takes effort to steer the brain back to rationality. “Tina,” I say into my phone. “Bastian,” Tina replies. “How’s the Grizzly Adams life going?” “Well, there’s a severe lack of grizzlies around these parts. I’ve heard rumors of a black bear in the neighborhood, but I have yet to be presented with any evidence, so the jury is still out on that one.”…

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Sugar Kisses

Extreme close-up of stacked cubes of sugar, under low key lighting

My phone rings while I am out across the property, shoveling pathways in the snow through the chicken run. The chickens do not enjoy walking through snow, and will all just stand inside the doorway to their coop for the entire day if they don’t have a trail dug for them to follow. I suppose if my feet were a half an inch thick, I wouldn’t want to be walking through a foot and a half of snow, either. I pull off one of my gloves and take my phone out of my pocket. “Rivi,” I say when I answer…

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A Flock of Dinosaurs

Portrait of a gray rooster with bright red comb, against a blurred green background.

The low this morning is 14 degrees. With the wind factored in, it’s a chilly 4 degrees outside when I bundle up and go to care for the chickens at the far south end of our property. We’ve had at least a foot and a half of snow in the past few days, so it’s safe to say that the morning is exciting. I admit to making the chickens wait until after I’ve had coffee. Being out in sub-freezing temperatures without caffeine is just too awful to even consider. When we bought this property, it came with a small horse…

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