This is our yurt. What you might not be able to tell by looking at this photo is that there is a fire built in a box stove inside and that it is beginning to snow on, this, one of the last days of November. It looks to be twilight here but is, in fact, early afternoon. I'm around somewhere loading brush onto a cart & hauling it over to a stick pile. On Christmas Eve I plan to torch that pile. I've been building this pile for about a month, month and a half. What I usually do is build a fire in the stove which either goes extremely smoothly or I curse at the the fire until tears well in my eyes mostly from the smoke coming from the fire-less sticks. But I never say screw it, I keep trying until the warm glow of flames gives me confidence that I can leave well enough alone, then I bumble out of the yurt and start up the tractor and start loading the cart with sticks.In the beginning, before this yurt, there was talk of a yurt. It started with our friend Desi. She wanted to buy a yurt together, a bunch of us. We were drunk and had thought that we might. It was going to be smaller than this, I think, and used for hanging out. It would reside at her house...in her front yard. The idea was dropped because it would take an investment from a bunch of us, and probably only be utilized by one of us, that is, after the honeymoon. Bev and I thought it would be good if we had a yurt. Well...Bev thought so, but I was still unsure. The truth is I was really against it at first, the investment being great and the thing would mostly end up a disaster. To be frank, up until this point I've been the kind of person, like a child who has many possessions, and loses interest far before they are worn out. When I did become intrigued, after hearing that people actually live in these things year round, I thought maybe this would be the solution to rent, I not liking to pay it.
We were not thinking sensibly, or I should say I wasn't when the opportunity to possibly rent one came to pass. This chick up in Vermont appeared to be in a fix, having to move a two-story art project of a yurt from a flood plain by order of FIMA or get charged something like a hundred bucks a day or something if she didn't. Well Bev & I mistook her for a hippy & a reasonable one at that & decided to help her out if we could. She wanted to draw up a contract and all that & did, but we didn't want to sign it when she didn't want negotiate what she didn't want to negotiate and well the whole thing took one long drip into a fiasco where she wanted to sue us & we were like "for what?" She had our guts all up in a dish rag twirl. We hardly ever go to Brattleboro any more because the whole affair was so unpleasant. I really thought then the whole yurt idea was being flushed down the toilet, but, you see, we have this land my wife inherited & well, it needed some company, I guess. Now this is where the story gets twirling in the fingers of a new dawning. My gal likes to look at old houses and old cars on the internet. In fact, she likes old artifacts, much if not all of which we can't afford. In her search for the unfordable she stumbled on the Groovy Yurts guy. He had these yurts up on a website that were imported from Mongolia. They were hand made and hard not to look at. I was being squeezed back into the tube. The cost was beyond our means, but somehow he made a deal with my wife and in October last year we were on our way to the country side outside of Montreal.
