I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a long time, but I’ve been struggling with how to write it without sounding like I’m complaining or whining. I don’t want to come off as ungrateful. I am deeply grateful and honestly very lucky to have found a cabin in the woods to rent and call home - these things are not easy to come by! But after a year and a half of full-time remote cabin life, I’ve realized it may not be for me anymore.
For context, I moved to here with my partner and our two dogs while I was in a state of immense grief, immediately after losing a parent in a very sudden fashion. And so initially, isolation is what I was seeking - I couldn’t bear the noises of the city anymore. I needed trees and owls and quietness and stars as I untangled and tended to the grief.
We hadn’t seen the place before we showed up just past sunset after an 8 hour drive in a Uhaul van on April first, 2022. This rickety old cabin is nestled on 2 acres up a dirt road on the mountainside. It has 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, unfinished wood shelving everywhere, no cupboards anywhere, paper thin walls and it’s completely surrounded by coniferous trees. There’s an old clawfoot tub with a window overlooking the woods, and a patio in the treetops off the bedroom - it was our dream to live somewhere like this.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David Thoreau
Immediately, we were acquainted with the first sign of trouble, which took the shape of a family of mice who called the kitchen countertops home. Apparently the previous tenants weren’t tidy people, and so there was a serious mouse problem to tackle as we tried to unpack and settle in. One time, a mouse actually poked its little head out of the ceiling vent in the bathroom, directly above where I was having a bath at the time (it was alarming yet mildly adorable).
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