Beaver fever

I am currently at a coffee shop outside Albany, a good 60 miles away from the house in the mountains.  I would be a liar if I said we came for the coffee and not for the wifi.. to our credit, this WAS the closest Bank of America and we had $2000 in checks we needed to deposit (and neither one of us trusts the whole mail-in system...) But I'll be honest: once we connected to the high speed internet we both sort of did this sigh/shudder combination so intense that it resembled a drug-addled Watutsi dance. 

The house is unbelievable: built in the late 1800's and the product of a quirky series of renovations by the decade since, it hosts chartreuse cabinetry, wood burning stoves, exposed birch support beams and large, wrap-around glass porches.  The property is also in the throes of being reclaimed by nature: there are foxes living in the storage barn, blackbirds in the studio attic, chipmunks burrowing through the stone steps and bright yellow finches that erupt around you in the grass like butterflies.  

Outside our window, a mother hummingbird has nested above the porch light, and she has mistakenly seen my poor cats through the screen as potential threats.  She spends hours taunting them-- these slow, lazy and completely unobservant indoor cats who never would've known she or her babies existed if she hadn't started dive bombing them through the window.  Nigel almost threw himself through the glass in frustration and I've had to barricade them from view with my luggage.

One of the artists we are living with is an amateur chef and in the mornings he whips up home made scones and frittata.  Last night we had a smorgasbord of fish tacos, sweet corn, lemon-broccoli and fresh guacamole.  

My studio overlooks the pathway to the garden, and beyond that there is a pond swarming with beavers: every morning, someone has to go down and break up the dam they rebuild each night in front of the tiny stream that runs through and down into a ravine, catching frogs and small fish in the mud.  The beavers wait outside and slap their massive flat tails against the water, and you have to be careful not to slip and fall on the thousands of beaver-made stakes surrounding the shore.