This is how I celebrated the snowy day: I dug out a few strings of lights and tangled them through the banisters.

And then I lit an inaugural fire in the woodstove. I wish I could manage to take a non-crooked picture of the fireplace, but you get the idea. Lawn chair, wet hats and gloves, small woodpile, and a flame. I haven't lit a wood fire for more than a year, and I was enthralled. In Harmony we often kept the stove going 24 hours a day, so a year without fire was a very strange one.

This is the view from my living room window. As soon as the snow began to fall, the little children who live across the street rushed out to catch snowflakes, and Tom and I rushed out to go for a walk, and the neighborhood cats sat on their windowsills and sulked.

Yesterday we had Christmas lights and a fire in the stove. I was tidying instead of tearing things apart. Tom fetched home the tiling materials, and the kitchen walls are almost ready for sanding. I'm finally beginning to image a habitable house.

I went upstairs and lay down on the bedroom floor so that I could see what the view will be from our bed. It's modest, like everything else about this house: all I could see was the neighbor's peaked roof, a tall bare maple, and a cutout of sky. But modest is okay with me. I've spent a year in an apartment with the most beautiful view in Portland, and have itched and sighed and despaired. Clearly I am not cut out for high-class living. I cannot wait to wake up in my little 1948 working-class cottage.