The Poetry of Summer

A poem I penned yesterday:

46 degrees, 5 am
last day of July

Ear buds in,
music on

A mug in hand, gifted to me recently
by a dear friend, filled with coffee

I am outside on the porch,
the woods bathed in stillness & darkness
& the loveliness of quietude,

sitting on a yoga ball, dancing
with the full moon in full view,

as happy as a heart that just saw
a field full of wildflowers
in full bloom

_________________

I’ve said it before and I reckon I will keep saying it, so long as it still holds true: I so very much love living in a location that has four distinctly different seasons. Here in western Montana, winter is our longest one, but spring, summer and fall all have their good runs.

Each season here has its own unique brand & flavor of genuine loveliness.

We’ve been in a stretch of high temperatures lately, as is currently the case in most places around the U.S. Here at Empty Mountain, nested as we are in a canyon, surrounded by thousands of acres of trees, our highest high temps are typically a few degrees cooler than even just 2-miles down the road where our gravel road spills into an open valley. And at night and in the early morning, our lowest low temps are often 10-15 degrees colder than the closest small town I can look up online. Right now as I type, it’s 8 am on August 1st. Our EM temp is 51 and in town it’s 66.

Due to the confines of our canyon, the sun currently rises up over the mountain closest to us around 7:45 AM. It rises in the closest town, situated in an open valley 4 miles east of us, at 6:16. As you can likely imagine, this pattern holds and tracks through the whole of the year. Our sun rise here in the canyon is always at least an hour and a half behind those who dwell in the valley.

Because Mike wonderfully and very intentionally built our small cabin with super good insulation value, even when the temp outside reaches into the 90’s, the inside of our cabin stays quite cool. In western Montana, we reach our highest temps around 4-5 PM each day. Over the past few days here at EM, our high has been 89 and inside we’ve only gotten to as high as 73. By the time we reach our max temp inside, which often isn’t until around 6 or 7 PM, it isn’t long until the temp outside starts dropping. We’ve been able to reopen our windows around 8 or 9 PM, which we then leave open all night to invite the cool air in. By the time I wake and rise, it’s typically around 60 degrees inside the cabin, and around 48 outside. Then I close the windows some time around sun up.

We don’t have air conditioning, but we do have really good insulation. We also do a number of things to ensure our small cabin stays cool when it’s hot out. We cool down the cabin over night. We’re very diligent about making sure to enter & exit the cabin as efficiently as possible during the heat of the day. Translation: we don’t leave the door open any longer than absolutely necessary, which is critical when living in the small. This practice should not be underestimated, it makes a huge difference (because everything temperature wise does in a small space). I also cook our dinner meal outside. We have two Coleman cook stoves so I leave one outside on the porch. It’s a bit of a hassle to transport everything I need to make dinner outside but I’m getting the hang of it and I’m starting to really enjoy it. And besides, it’s super worth it in terms of not adding extra heat to the inside of the cabin. When I cook dinner, it increases the temperature of the cabin by an average of 3 degrees. So you can see what I mean when I say that everything temperature wise makes a noticeable difference in a small space.

The poetry of summer is in full tilt. It’s hot and dry and our skies are now smoke-filled from wildfires, mostly right now from ones burning in states that surround Montana. Though we certainly have a few fires burning of our own. Some folks refer to the time we’re now in as our fifth season of the year. There’s fall, winter, spring, summer, and then there’s wildfire season. And now that we live where we do, we are much more attuned with our “fifth season” than we were or needed to be when we lived in Missoula. I keep my eye on the fire forecast and an ear on the pulse of any nearby fires. We live in the trees, so it’s important for us to keep ourselves well informed.

Oh sweet thicket of summer. The cool waters of the close by Clark Fork River. The huckleberries ripening higher up in elevation. The ease of outdoor living. The sun pouring down into our solar panels, filling up the batteries we use for our household’s electricity. All of it in wonderful orchestration, creating a heartsong of gladness.