I’m on my second cup of coffee, just finished my second day-old scone with strawberry preserves from The Brown Palace, and we have Toy Story on the telly. Rosie and I are communicating in sentences; and she has a flair for the dramatic, I’m proud to say.
It’s a lovely Sunday morning.
The grasses in the fields outside the window are turning green, and there is a chartreuse blush on the flowering bushes. The birds are in riotous form, with meadowlarks and blue birds and robins and warblers. There is a red-tailed hawk that guards it all from above in lazy figure eights.
I arrived back in Parker on Friday afternoon and spent yesterday unpacking the bed of the truck (Big Red) so I can get the hitch back in and move the Hovel up closer to the house. I need to get busy setting it up for another summer in the park.
The uncomfortable sleeper sofa that came with the rig is gone, as is the broken down swivel rocker/recliner that was heavy as homemade sin. In their place I have the Poang chair I bought for my bedroom in the early 2000s, and a lovely light sage green chaise that I will have to reposition every time we move the rig, but will make such a lovely place to sit and read and look out the window at the West Thumb of Lake Yellowstone.
I’m also getting a new mattress and a new toilet. I’m buying myself one of those memory foam mattresses that ships for free, lets you try it for 100 nights, and will come and get it if you hate it. I don’t think I’m going to hate it. The toilet is a composting toilet. I like that I won’t be using so much water to flush body waste into a sewer system, and is a fraction of what it would cost to build a septic system to support the Hovel when I winter in Colorado this coming year.
I’ll be wintering in Colorado rather than in Yellowstone because the family is about to get bigger again. There will be a new baby, soon, and I want the chance to be a grandma and a good mother-in-law and lend a hand this winter.
This will be a good place to spend a winter. Gardiner was also a good place to spend the winter. Such a quiet little town in the off-season and the walk to work and back every day under the watch of Electric Peak, in all kinds of weather, was a treat. I never knew what animals I would see in the field across from the building. Would it be bison, or elk, or pronghorn. Some days it was a trifecta. I could do another winter, there.
