Staying at Solar

Our lease at Solar Cabin was set to run out on the 31st of May, and with a thirty-day notice clause we needed to tell our current landlord if we were staying or going by the 1st. Time was ticking. At the end of April, Peter and I saw an ad for a beautiful cabin just down the road. We called the number on the filer, holding our collective breath for the landlord to call back. After much dancing around and talking to the ever-sketchier seeming gentleman on the phone, we finally met him for an interview three days before the first of the month.

I loved the potential cabin. It has a couple of rooms, a huge woodstove, a shower and sauna, an enormous deck and sunroom (no toilet, though - but the path to the outhouse isn't through a swamp.) It is an old cabin, lived in for many years by many families and has the feel of a place well loved and thoroughly broken in. It has a few quirks, though. Dream Cabin is on the main (busy) road into town with waterlines that tend to freeze up in the dead of winter, an iffy stovepipe and a landlord that falls far to the end of the 'eccentric' continuum. Peter and I both know that this can be a little ... disconcerting ... in a landlord. He interviewed us with narrow eyes (behind pink-and-turquoise women's reading glasses) and a skeptical, rapid-fire cross-examination of our intentions and abilities more suited to a murder investigation. We left not knowing what to expect. But I had my heart set on the place.

In the mean time, Solar Cabin Landlord got wind that we were thinking of moving. She sprang into action, and soon had someone lined up willing to sign a lease. By the time we heard back from Dream Cabin Landlord that our references hadn't been home when he called, and so we had lost the lease, it was April 30th. I called Solar Cabin Landlord to talk about our options, and was immediately informed that we had to sign a year lease or move out. (We had been hoping for an extension through the summer.) Talk about a bummer of a day.

One day does not rental-hunting time make. We searched the paper and likely filer-spots in town frantically for other options, but decided in the end to hold the bird we had and not go sling shotting into May (already full of other things) wildly trying to hit something better and still within budget. Solar Cabin it is.

Not that we don't love it here. It is a cozy little place that we have made into a cozy little home. The vast deck is wonderful now that the weather has started compensating for the bitter interior winter, and the area is a safe if not overtly friendly place with a good network of roads and trails to walk on and neighbors we are starting to meet. We are out of town, but not too far out. We are comfortable here.

But we don't have a woodstove to stave off the winter chill (a generic heater just doesn't cut the gloom when sunshine only skims the horizon for a few hours, even if it technically keeps the place warm) and no arctic entry to keep the air from rushing out every time we open the door. The outhouse-honey-pot arrangement we don't mind, but a shower would have been nice. And living in one room is, well, living in one room, even if it is a bigish room by local cabin standards. Anyway, it seemed a lot smaller after walking through Dream Cabin's winding maze of add-ons and imagining stoking the woodstove for a late night read waiting for Peter to get home.

Extending Solar Cabin's lease has thrown us into an Upgrading Solar Frenzy. We finally took (my) sister-in-law Meg's wedding gift (designated cozy-chair funds) and found the perfect cozy chair for the corner we'd been saving. It lives up to its purpose, and there are other re-arrangements in the books for the next month or so. But it is a busy month. Maybe we'll switch things up in June instead. (THANKS MEG!!) For the record, this month in Solar marks the first time I have lived in one place for more than nine months since my sophomore year of college. I have to admit, part of me has been craving this stability (and dreading a possible move, even if to a Dream.) The Cozy Chair is an anchor I'm happy to have.

[find your happy place]

In the mean time, Summer has come in earnest. A few weeks ago, we had our first non-freezing night and the melting snow and muck are gone. Days are long (24 hours of visible light, long) and warm, and Nyssa is spending most of them stretched out in a coma of bliss on the porch. I have never felt like I earned a summer. I feel like I earned this one, and so far it has been perfect, even with Solar Cabin to look forward to for another year in Fairbanks.

PS. Check out my Photos from a recent trip up the Real Arctic. More on this later, but the pictures are too fun not to share!