We have some major landscaping going on here, and the place looks like a moonscape. There have been bulldozers and skid steers, the power company (three times), the stone and gravel guy, and, of course, a perfectly-timed autumn deluge to delay the whole process and increase the pleasure of muddy dogs and white bedspreads. No distractions here.

We live in the woods, and if there’s one thing we have a great deal of, it’s firewood. We had promised our neighbor and stalwart friend, Mark, that he could have the rather enormous stack down in the woods. It’s a long difficult hill to drag that wood up by hand, and he had been slowly tackling it over the course of the past year. With the new grading, though, it was suddenly possible to get his pickup down there without damaging anything, so we were hurrying–in advance of deluge–to load up the wood in the truck while we still could. We were down in the woods, throwing logs into the truck, unaware of what was going on up at the house.

When I came in to clean up for dinner there was a UPS delivery by the side door: a big stack of boxes. I swear it took me nearly three minutes to realize what they were:
100 copies North of the Tension Line. 

Official retail shipments begin arriving Monday.