– letters from the forest –
“the beginning moments”
I want to tell you about the sunsets. There have been two that mattered.—
The first came on the shoulder of a highway in eastern Quebec, at the low point of a genuinely terrible day — the day our truck lost fifth gear, and then reverse, in a church parking lot, halfway to a life we thought we wanted out on the East Coast. We couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t go back, so we turned around and limped home. And the instant we did, the rain stopped, the traffic vanished, and the sky went gold the whole way. It took me a while to understand the universe wasn’t punishing us. It was redirecting us.
The second sunset came almost two years later, on a lookout on twelve acres of forest near Whitefish Lake — the evening we first walked the land that would become ours. My husband and I stood there as the light fell through the trees and had the exact same ridiculous thought at the exact same moment: we’re home..
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I stopped waiting for my real life to begin — and realized it had been happening the whole time.
I don’t want to lose any of it to time. The warts and the sunsets both. So I’m going to write it down, here, one letter at a time. Some of it will make you laugh. Some of it made me cry to write. All of it is true.
Pull up a chair. There’s a whole story coming.
Nearly everything I want to write about in this series lives somewhere between those two sunsets.
This is Letters from the Forest,
and I’ll be honest about what it is:
It’s the part of me that has nothing to do with business, and everything to do with who I am. I’ve never believed you can cleanly separate the person from the work.
The way you live, the things that break your heart and the things that mend it, the pace you keep, the people you love — all of it walks into the room with you, whether you’re standing behind a camera or building a home off-grid on a patch of forest.
So rather than keep those worlds politely apart, I’m going to let you see the whole of it.
This is where the whole of me gets to show up.
And it has been a life,
these last few years.
We left the city — a decade-long dream finally acted on, and moved onto raw land with no water, no power, no internet, and a composting toilet, and set about building a home the slow, hard, layered way: rammed earth, largely by hand, mostly ourselves.
Since then I’ve hauled water up from a lake, taught myself to crochet through a brutal first winter, found some of my dearest friends at a road-maintenance meeting, planted an orchard for someone I lost, discovered my hair was a colour nobody had ever told me about, and watched a fox curl up and fall asleep on the foundation of a house that isn’t even built yet.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I stopped waiting for my real life to begin and realized it had been happening the whole time.
I don’t want to lose any of it to time.
The warts and the sunsets both.
So I’m writing it all here, one letter at a time.
Some of it will make you laugh. Some of it made me cry to write.
All of it is true.
Pull up a chair. There’s a whole story coming.
til the next letter —
Annemarie
