I really love these most recent photos. I’m so glad that I have them. They are from two days ago and even now they could not be recreated. The cracks and openings the let in that last bit of golden daylight have since been covered. There was just this one chance. This one day to capture it, before it would be forever transformed.

I had intended to write a bit about our building progress the other day when I posted, but by the time I got back to the computer it was late and I was exhausted. I’m not sure that I have the words now either. There is so much, that it’s almost too much to talk about it. It’s just easier to be quietly going through the process.

With each step in the process I become more and more convinced of the structure’s inherent beauty. It’s almost like a living thing to me now and I’m watching to see what it grows into.

I was especially struck by the development of the rafters. It’s difficult to explain why exactly. Until that point everything was straight and square, this was an entirely new element. I’m in awe of the angles and the precision. Is stirred some sort of deeply reverent feelings in me. This is shelter. This cutting into the sky and shedding the elements to either side. The very form itself, while entirely new, feels ancient. It’s a strange sensation to know you are carving out a physical space in the world. A dwelling. A home. It’s so much more then just boards and walls. For some reason, whenever I looked at it, my mind’s eye kept picturing a very, very old Scandinavian farm house.

My involvement in the process is limited these days, for which I am greatly thankful. There are so many other things that I need to be concentrating on right now. Often times I’m still recruited for tracking down and ordering supplies or researching the safety of a certain material or finding and alternative to the conventionally used product. But it’s not the constant involvement that it was before.

This part of the building process is much harder on Steve though. He has an old back injury that is being aggravated by the continuous overhead lifting. It is very hard, strenuous work.

I often find myself feeling restless about the whole thing. It’s hard having Steve here, and yet never getting to really see him. It wears on my nerves to be trying to get a fitful toddler to sleep with someone hammering around the window over his head, and to know that I will be doing it again the next day and yet again the day after that. Beyond the day to day-ness of it, the part that really wears me down is knowing how very far we still have to go. That this is only step two in a long list of steps that is going to be stretched out indefinably over the course of years I can’t yet count.

It’s the simple little things that I miss and I long for…though it all adds up to an entirely different way of life. I see other people who seem so very comfortable and I try to remember what it was like to have relaxing time, all together, as a family. And I know that we will be there again someday, but in the meantime, these are the years that I most wanted to savor and take slow, these years when our children are still little and still so much a part of our lives. I guess there is still a part of me the mourns the loss of these last three years since I became ill. They are not been entirely lost to us and surely there has been some gain, but they are not what the could have been. What they would have been.

I daydream a lot about the colors of walls and what to hang where and the look of home-made rugs. I guess it must seem like such a silly thing, when we are still so far from all of that. But it’s a pleasurable thing for me and it gets me through some of the rougher days. It’s also nice to know that I’ve been granted the time to refine my own vision and surely there must be some blessings in that.