Just enough

My coffee table is a charred juniper log. The tree was killed in a fire 30 years or more ago. It’s just flat enough to keep the cup from tipping, if I am careful enough. The log/table works if I move slow enough. If I pay enough attention. Making it work is not high effort, just slow effort, attentiveness.

I thought about laying in boards to make it easier to put down the cup without thinking, but in some ways it would be more effort to make it easy. It would also deprive me of the need to pay attention, in the moment, to how the cup sits crooked on the log.

The twins and I are up here at our new address, living in a tin tent of about 260 square feet with snowcapped and pine clad mountains outside the door. At 13 they still fit in their bunk beds at one end, I have a pseudo queen bed at the other. We have a kitchen. I let them choose which seat they each own at the table, back packs for school on the bench next to them and against the wall, lunch boxes on the table flanking a rack of newly purchased silverware.

The landlord turned our home of the last year into a vacation rental. I thought we had it worked out for the rest of the summer, but nothing is good unless it is in writing and when the FedX’d agreement arrived from San Francisco, there were terms not discussed. The strain on our blended family had become cataclysmic, Lauren and her two boys have gone one way, the girls and I another.

There is wonderful closeness of living in the trailer. I am never far from the girls as they are doing homework, I watch them draw and hear the rustle of turning pages in Manga books they read backwards. They have their iPods, of course. We will have a tipi next week.

My living room is outside, acres of living room. A lawn chair 50 feet from the trailer looks out over the Cascades. Move the chair and see different mountains, the Three Sisters from one point, Mt. Washington from another, Mt. Jefferson from beneath the tree over there.

There is more quiet than I’ve had in many years. It is a lonely, lovely, healing quiet, often quite full. Last night the girls’ godfather came over for a steak. We sat out there in a thunderstorm booming over the mountains and to the north of us, pummeling Black Butte. Jon looked out through juniper to mountains 20 miles away but in our lap, then he looked up at clouds roiling overhead.

“Love what you’ve done with the ceiling.”

Pheasant wander through the sage with double hollow clarinet call, escapees from the nearby hunting preserve. A snake track disappears under the contractor’s outhouse, I look very, very carefully before sitting down. Breezes brush the pines.

Choices are often hard. Rewards hard to see. There are days when sadness clings like humidity. But two beautiful girls read books and do homework, I have a project in concrete and steel 20 yards away. We don’t have TV. We have cell phones, and high speed internet is pumped to us wirelessly from an antenna three miles away when I choose to start the generator.

It is enough. And if I pay slow attention, it is more than enough.