Memo from Idaho.

Up the road, they're excavating a site where, formerly, there was a cabin. This was a place on the river--we used to use their pier to walk out to the water, and to clamber up after a river float. Now, there's a truck rumbling up and down, carrying away dirt and rock from that site. Eventually, maybe, there'll be a new cabin there.

In the spirit of home improvement, we have purchased two new mattresses. The old ones were pretty darn old--fifty years old, my dad says. Below, the miracle of a box spring, naked and still shiny. It was very springy, which made it not such an excellent mattress for sleeping. For making a lot of bouncy noise, it was awesome.

Hardly anyone is up here in the village. So we walked up the road past the cabins, at the moment unoccupied, to the river.

There are birds everywhere. We found a couple of nests in the eaves.


We also have burrowed in, with our food, our paints, our woolly socks (it's a bit chilly here), our cameras, our books.

On our evening walk, the birds let us get pretty close: