– letters from the forest –
“The To-Do List That Beat the Scroll”
Letters from the Forest —
“The To-Do List That Beat the Scroll”
I got an email this morning from Jenna Kutcher. She’d bought walkie talkies — actual walkie talkies — and she wanted to tell me why. The short version: she’d been daydreaming about a wood-paneled room with a single desktop computer you had to physically walk into and then physically leave. A room where the internet stayed put and your life carried on without it.
I read it quietly, coffee in hand, before I pulled my boots on and disappeared outside. It’s become a kind of ritual: sit, see what needs attention, answer what matters. Because once I step out the door, time dissolves. The land has a way of absorbing you completely, and hours pass that feel like twenty minutes.
I thought: I know that room. Mine just doesn’t have walls.
I still have the internet.
Let me be honest about that. We have wifi, phones, all of it. I’m not going to pretend we went off-grid and found enlightenment in the silence.
What I will tell you is this: the to-do list outside got so long, so alive, so immediate, that the scroll simply lost the competition. Didn’t have a chance, really
This spring has been less screen, more shovel
And I have zero complaints.
There’s a meadow now over where the septic went in — I seeded it myself, and watching it come up has been one of the quieter thrills of my life. Rock walls I’ve been stacking by hand. Log stairs cut from what the land gave us. Hostas and ferns and echinaceas tucked into hillside corners, and a little cluster of hens and chicks that made the journey from the city with me — because I couldn’t leave my garden behind any more than I could leave a pet. I took cuttings and transplanted them all before we moved.
The most precious is an echeveria that has been with me longer than this land has. It was propagated from my wedding bouquet. It thrived in my city garden for years, and when we left, I brought a piece of it with me. It lives now in a willow basket on an old stump, nestled into moss — the basket itself a product of a cheerful afternoon experiment in weaving that produced something more sculptural than functional. I loved it for that. A few chipmunks have since claimed the base of the stump as their own. I gave them a stone door.
And then there’s the actual build.
We’ve been mixing and testing rammed earth wall samples, dialling in the RE recipe, waiting on compression test results before we can commit to anything structural. Right now we’re sitting on our hands, watching the calendar, trying to be patient about something we are not remotely patient about. The flat pad of gravel at the top of the ridge is ready. The walls just need the paperwork to catch up.
Last night the sky above it turned amber and rose and indigo all at once, and I just stood there with dirty hands and looked at it.
You don’t scroll through a sunset like that. You just receive it.
We carry FRS radios when we’re both out on the property.
It started as practical — the land is steep, the trees are thick, the machinery is loud — but it’s become something I genuinely love. No notification. No distraction wrapped around the message. Just a crackle, a voice, a location. I’m by the upper rock face. Where are you?
Good thing we had them the day my husband came walking out of the forest looking like he’d been shot. The swing arm of the CAT had caught him on the head. He was fine — needed a little compression and a moment to let his pride recover — but I’ve never been more grateful for a simple, direct line between two people on a piece of land that is still, in so many ways, figuring out how to let us in.
This is what I couldn’t have told you before:
I didn’t need less noise. I just needed noise I’d actually chosen.
The land is loud. It needs things from you constantly. It asks you to show up with your body, your attention, your bad back and your work gloves, (I swear this property is my 200K gym membership). It doesn’t care how many followers you have. It responds to effort and patience and a willingness to come back tomorrow and do it again.
I come in tired, muddy, often full of bug bits yet more myself than I have ever been.
The internet is still here. It’s just not the most interesting thing in the room anymore.
Cheers to walkie talkies, stump sculptures, and afternoons that make you forget your phone exists.
