Thanksgiving Week, 2006
Welcome to a celebration of the seasons at Thimbleberry Cabin! Fall is just about to conclude, a season of both beginnings and endings at Thimbleberry... Fall is the season in which we first bought this cabin in 2004. Fall is when we launched our vacation rental business in 2005. Most importantly, fall is when we begin to bid a bittersweet farewell to the current year and eagerly await a new year's wintry birth...
The southern Oregon Cascades "snow door" was flung wide-open this fall, and we enjoyed a white Thanksgiving at the cabin. Our little acre of lightly wooded meadow was transformed into a scene straight from a snow-globe. Paul spent a fair number of evenings reading Sybille von Olfers' "Root Children" to our four-year-old, Gigi, at bedtime and I must admit that familiar old story takes on a whole new resonance when there's a good 6" of fresh snow blanketing the ground!
Of course we had a delicious turkey dinner, but this is the week's meal I wanted to record -- just good crusty bread, some cheese and a hard salami. The simplest of meals transformed by the setting and the mood. The vintage game bird bar glasses were a thrift store score at $.80/each. No more mixing up our drinks now that each of us can be readily identified as a "wild turkey," "mourning dove" or "wood cock"...
Santa-in-a-canoe journeyed north in our Honda and didn't have to portage even once...
I love this John Muir quote... I don't know what Muir would make of all the faux greenery, though -- hopefully he would applaud any impulse to leave trees largely unmolested. I do miss the smell of fresh greenery in the house. Seems ironic in the midst of so much surrounding forest to be favoring fake over real, but out here we are far from a manned fire-station and the heat provided by our trusty wood stove is so very, very drying... So faux it is; I have only to walk outside and inhale for a good strong whiff of the real stuff.
Thimbleberry got its first Christmas tree this year! Found this quirky cabin porch ornament at the thrift store and personalized it with some homemade vellum labels. The girls and I made our customary pilgrimage to The Unicorn in downtown Ashland for a few new ornaments. Slowly we are building up our collection...
Splurged on a beautiful set of snowshoe reading lamps from the Orvis catalogue to hang on either side of the master bedroom's bed. Just looking at the soft, warm light they cast makes me feel drowsy. Of course, not all of the week's check-listed chores and installations went so smoothly... Spent nearly 6 hours trying to get an Earthlink dial-up internet connection going before throwing up our hands in frustration and calling it quits. And we're simply not ready for the constant intrusion of a satellite dish into our life in the mountains. Anyone can easily check email at the public library when making a trip into town. Some things are better left "as is"...
Sometimes it's the simplest things, like this L.L. Bean snow stick stuck in the ground just outside our kitchen window, that bring the most pleasure. Now if we could only teach Ruby to read the numbers and report back to us in barks or growls... On the porch we installed a wireless weather station receiver so that we can obsessively contrast indoor and outdoor temperatures and watch the barometric pressure drop with each approaching cold front. Thrilling stuff!
This is the sort of vignette that makes every day in the Cascades seem special. We were out in the garage, completely caught up in the mundane tasks of cleaning up from Christmas decorating & sorting our trash, when all of a sudden the clouds parted above the Mountain Lakes Wilderness, allowing the barest sliver of sunset to flit across the face of its western slope. We shot this from the top of our own driveway, full trashcans and empty boxes momentarily eclipsed by the ancient dance of sunlight on fresh snow...
Arrived home in Sonoma county dog-tired from Thanksgiving at the cabin and were greeted by the happy spectacle of jars & jars of brined olives lined up in rows in our pantry. Just over ten quarts this year, from our four trees. And we're not talking pampered orchard divas, no...these are real urban tree soldiers growing in the midst of garden hodge-podge on a 5,000-square-foot busy corner lot near downtown Santa Rosa. Amazing! I do love home-brined olives... 
Wouldn't you reckon with this many olives about there's just gotta be a martini in here somewhere??
