Cedars

It's also true that cutting cedars is nothing like writing, which is exactly why I'm doing it — I don't want to avoid writing, but after four months living at this place I want to leave a more permanent mark. On the land, and on myself. For most of the time I didn't bother with trees: I wrote and read, kicked around, had some dinner parties and built many fires in the stone pit, some kindled with cedars. I don't think I wrote better in seclusion than I would anywhere else, though I did write a lot and consistently well. For me what made the place was being able to stand up from the big work desk set along the windows, put on my boots and my hat, and walk out the screen door onto 280 acres that were mine to explore, and the best tromps were with my wife and my dog, all along the limestone creeks, or searching for arrowheads on the banks, or following fence lines up the cliffs and through the cedar barrens. Cutting cedar emerged as a way to say goodbye to all this, and a good way to ignore the fact that we had to leave. Unlike Adam and Eve, we never even met the snake.