Outside Winthrop, whitetail and ravens compete for rotten crabapples as they drop into snow. In town, fences cage unpruned trees.
Wet Wool
When I was a kid, my favorite play-pretend game was Lost on a Desert Island, and my adult home is not so different from my childhood fantasy. Except that it’s decidedly not a desert, tucked into the famously wet Cascades: mosses and lichens, conifers and hardwoods, salmon and eagles. Not the stuff of Robinson Crusoe, this. You’d freeze in Tarzan garb. It’s not really an island either, just a small valley separated from the outside world by steep jagged mountains, a whole lot of them, and long skinny lake, deep and cold and treacherously windy.
