Day 4 Alone - Reminiscing       Seventy-one years on and I’ve come full circle. As a five year old farm kid, I had to use an outhouse, and haul buckets of water from the pump house. Here I am all these years later, and nothing’s changed, except I’m bucketing from a lake. What’s worse, while I was so ‘relieved’ back then once we ‘modernized’, and had water plumbed to the house, here I am now volunteering to step back in time. Go figure. Nostalgia? Or masochism?        Ah, but the wood stove makes all the difference. Back then, it was a coal furnace, and I was…

Day 3 Alone - Whether We Weather Weather’s Wind       “Easy peasy”, she’d said. “You’ll be bored,” she’d said! Wind screamed through the leaning treetops surrounding the cabin, moaned past the woodstove pipe’s chimney top and blasted a downdraft onto the dancing flames in the stove. The cabin windows rattled in sympathy.        Outside in the late afternoon gathering darkness, sideways snow streaked eastward down the lake, highlighted by the corrugated whitecaps tumbling before the driving westerly. A hundred and forty miles to the west, another major low pressure system was hammering the British Columbia coast.        ‘Well…I don’t think I’m gonna be bored.’…

Day 2 Alone - Metamorphosis “Ne te quiviceros extra” - do not seek the answer outside yourself. (R.W.Emerson - Self Reliance)       Solitude is such a wonderful Gift. So hard to find, or create, in modern Society, and even harder to understand. Even if you are single, the World is teeming both outside your door, and inside your ‘devices’. Avoid having these ‘devices’ and you are judged ‘behind the times’. “Get with the Times, Oldtimer!” Even worse, having the devices and ignoring them will have Folks calling you anti-social.       And what’s so wrong with being anti-social? Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Self Reliance explained that man is faced…

                                       Day 1 Alone - Transitioning   Will Sturgeon - Hoofwrangler Intro     Well, I imagine everyone who regularly reads Jen’s Blogs knows what’s up. I’m spending a week out at Eliguk to feed the fire, the critters, and my Soul, while she’s off for long-awaited wrist surgery. As a ‘gotcha’ surprise, she asked me to write a few articles she could post on her Blog as her recovering wrist would prevent her from typing for a while.      So I should probably warn you, I write a lot of introspective…

The day has almost arrived, filled with anticipation and a bit of anxiety about how I'll manage the coming month (or possibly longer) with limited use of my right hand...I know it will feel as if it's bound behind my back! My carpal tunnel surgery is scheduled for the 5th, and fortunately, we've secured a resort sitter. This means my husband and I can venture out to the metropolis together, turning a challenging time into an opportunity for a shared outing together. It seems we've managed to get out and away for a supply run almost once a year now, thanks to all those who have come to our rescue.…

Have you seen the new 'Life at Eliguk' tab? If you click it, once inside you'll see all 17 pages of the trilogy that was published in 'The Backwoodsman' Magazine. I've compiled them in the best format I could so you could all read them without purchasing the magazines.

Home Grown Foods A common thread in many conversations is the shared interest in food, or the weather. If you're paying attention, you'll be able to guess the season simply by the foods served, or what's available in some far-off regions. I know most  households stock up on the necessities and currently have a large storage of foods from all around the globe. Out here in our neck of the woods, our diet changes with the cycle of the year, yet you could say we are prepared for a food shortage of sorts. Imagine a time not long ago, when we only ate the foods available to us by means…

Mushroom foraging Autumn arrived with a brisk cold front and lingering dampness, a phenomenon the media dubs an 'atmospheric river.' It's a grandiose term for what amounts to several days of rainfall. It's remarkable how swiftly the weather can shift; one moment, you're leisurely enjoying beverages floating on the lake, and the next, you're stoking the wood stove to ward off the cabin's chill. These temperature fluctuations often come in on the heels of a significant windstorm, with the wind itself—a force invisible, but for the ripples on the lake, the dance of leaves, and sway of branches—echoing the silent progression of time...quietly sculpting the contours of our lives. Its…

By the end of August, the Hoys had reserved a long weekend, providing us with a two-day window to launder all the bedding and tidy up both cabins after the previous five guests. We eagerly anticipated this visit, as spending time with friends and loved ones was something we needed, hoping it would restore our sense of familiar routine. In saving Mountain Man a trip to town for a supply run, Nadine did all our shopping and brought a cooler loaded with groceries to re-stock anything we were running low on. We always do our menu planning together and she always pitches in with bringing homemade treats like sourdough bread,…

DISCLAIMER: The content of this blog may be a trigger for anyone who is currently in distress; reading any further could be emotionally challenging and potentially traumatic.  We had a week to unwind, from the visit with the grandkids, and fishermen that followed; but at the same time it was all work nonetheless. Every bed in every cabin needed laundering, and there wasn't a fresh clean towel left at the resort. The glitch was the sudden change in weather, getting socked in with rain that persisted for days! It made working inside the cabins (scrubbing them down from ceiling to floor), easier to do knowing the weather would keep me…