Well, the work on the mountain cabin has all but been wrapped up. After a few more deliveries and a new HVAC unit going in this coming week, we will be all settled in. The rooms have all been painted, cleaned and decorated and the place now feels like home, our perfect little mountain cabin. We will now have time to relax and enjoy our beautiful surroundings before heading back to Ohio in a few weeks. We will be going up to celebrate birthdays and Thanksgiving with the Ohio Mountain Chillins. I am looking forward to seeing them all again, along with all of our extended family and friends that we left behind. With all of the modern technologies that we have now in our lives, it is so much easier to stay closely connected to our loved ones, so even though there are over 600 miles between us, I can still talk to them almost daily and see their face. It does help with the homesickness. Still, nothing is better than a good hug! I'm looking forward to lots of those!
Since we have more free time now, we have been taking advantage of having the Chattahoochee National Forest in our back yard. There is a beautiful, gently sloping trail that leads through the mountains that we have been walking. With each walk that we take, we have ventured further up the mountain. With Mountain Man being a hunter, we normally can navigate the trails looking for signs of all of the forest creatures and sometimes even stumbling across a few without making a peep. With this years drought, though, there is no such thing as a silent step. The beautifully colored leaves that carpet the trail are so dry that the crunch of our footsteps is almost deafening. There is absolutely no chance of quietly coming upon a feeding doe or any of the other small wildlife scampering about. They are able to hear us long before they see us. Just as when we are sitting on our deck, we can hear them making their way along the well worn trails long before we can see them. Autumn in the mountains is so different from Autumn anywhere else that I have experienced it. The air is cleaner, the sky is so clear and blue that I sometimes feel like I'm looking at it through a high definition camera lens. The leaves vary much so in color that I'm sure there are not even names for some of the beautiful shades that they turn. If you stop long enough and sit quietly, you can hear the birds and critters calling out to one another in their own personal conversations that we are blessed to be able to eavesdrop in on. The wonders of nature are truly here in these North Georgia mountains. I'm not wishing my life away, but I am living in anticipation of the spring, when hopefully the drought will subside and the creeks and rivers will once again be filling and the sounds of the babbling waters flowing down the mountain. Since I am a water baby by nature, I do miss having the water around me.
After a light dinner this evening, we trekked back out into the woods to collect some wood to turn into walking sticks and curtain rods. We hiked up the hill across from our cabin, selected the perfect saplings; a hickory for me since Mountain Man says that a hickory is a lady's stick and a mighty oak for him. In true Mountain Man nature, he used his handy little ax to cut them down. No chain saws for this Mountain Man! As we were dragging our saplings back up the road to our cabin, I secretly hoped that none of the neighbors would drive by. You see, the hickory that I was dragging was nearly 20 feet long and the Oak was every bit of 15 feet. Oh, and, I forgot to mention that since this wasn't a planned adventure, I was wearing my slippers. When you are alone on a mountain most of the time, you tend to forget that, on occasion, other people are around! We were almost back to our driveway when we heard a car coming up the road, I didn't realize how fast I could move in slippers dragging a big stick. I felt like I was doing the mountain version of Cross Fit! I beat the car, so no explanation needed! Mountain Man then cut the sticks to length, skinned them both and they are now drying so they can be sanded and oiled. This will make our hikes quite a bit easier. Plus, having it made with love, just for me, makes it even more important. I will be making curtains for the basement windows when the fabric comes and I will have enough of the saplings left to use as curtain rods. This living off of the land thing is fun. Now every excursion into the forest will surely provide more decorating ideas and materials!
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