Winter 2007
The wind was blowing a gale, harder than any wind I have even been in before. The walls were shaking and rattling, threatening to blow over any moment.
“I’m going to bed.” I announced, “This place will stand or fall whether I’m asleep or not.”
I crawled into the tent that was set up inside the one room cabin, I was wearing thick quilted coveralls to stave off the cold, I found out the following day that it got down to 14 degrees F overnight. Much of our canned food was inside the tent to take advantage of our body heat to keep it from freezing. I’ll explain why there was a tent inside the cabin a little further down.
We had driven 12 hours across Texas, PB in a ’73 Chevy truck pulling a 30 foot trailer with no working brakes, the truck didn’t have very good brakes either. I was driving a ’89 Dodge minivan, I was pulling the VW Bug filled with boxes. This was Dec 22, 2007 when we arrived on the property. We got here on a wing and a prayer.
We were exhausted, after getting here, we still had to hike up the hill to get to the cabin that would soon turn into the sky castle. Did I mention the wind was blowing, hard? We had an open invitation from our neighbor to come into his house and use his spare bedroom, we were too tired to even think about going back into that wind to hike back down the hill, all I wanted to do was go to bed, and that’s exactly what I did.
We didn’t have heat yet, the wood burning stove was still on the trailer, it was one of the last things we packed as we used it to heat the place where we lived before. Now to the tent inside the cabin.
When PB was building the box on stilts that we would call home, he put up the deck that would become our floor, he had been sleeping in a tent on the property, the critters would come visit him at night, so he decided to put the tent on the deck, he built the cabin around the tent and left it there when it was time for us to move in.
The tent had a mattress on the floor, I have to tell you, it was the most comfortable thing I could imagine that night, I slept like a baby, with my little chihuahua by my side. PB was too wired up to sleep, pair that with the wind that tried to remove us from our little mountain side, he just couldn’t go to bed, so he sat up in a chair that first night.
The following nights, I didn’t sleep so well myself, the wind really tested that 16×16 wooden box on stilts, I spent the next few nights in prayer overnight, praying that the wind wouldn’t knock us down. I also drove to town, I went to the hardware store and purchased a long length of cable, PB used it to tie the corner of the cabin to two different trees, that helped stabilize the place until he could work on reinforcing the walls and such.
We have come a long way since that humble beginning. I have to say that I love my life and couldn’t imagine living any other way.
Read part one here
https://off-grid.net/wretha/the-beginning
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