There’s nothing quite like stepping off a wide, flat trail into dense underbrush—especially in the Pacific Northwest, where that underbrush is a ubiquitous green sponge. Everything is wet and smells of a fresh rot, a delightful paradox to pass slowly through. This feeling of straying from the known is particularly sweet when a whole world of Chanterelles lay hidden all around you.

Being new to town, we were quite lucky yesterday to have some friends share their trusted spot for finding the golden mushrooms. This is a secret they share once, so you have to pay attention to where you are if you ever want to go again. The drive took us through a long gorgeous valley, along a blue river to the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. Our first time mushrooming was a year ago and River was a sleeping bundle on our backs. This time round he nearly ran the trail with us, chest out, proud to keep up. Off the trail he beamed, walking (with help) over and under rotting moss covered everything, dwarfed by ferns, all of us dwarfed by old growth trees.

Our camera just crapped out on us the day before or I would have had a hundred pictures of that smiling boy deep in the trail-less woods. I know he won’t remember the particular day, but I hope the feel of it seeps into him.

It was dusk in the shadow of the peaks by the time we meandered out, bags full, and began heading back to the cars. Later, after River was asleep, Elle and I laid our harvest out, sipped beers from mason jars and began cleaning the dirt from the the golden orange mushrooms, glowing about our lives.

Instead of blogging, I’ve been logging hours submitting poems, revising new and old drafts, laying brick for that fabled wood-fired pizza oven, gathering free building materials from around town, and working to step up my papa and husbanding game. All in all it’s been a good run. Had a poem picked up by Willow Springs, where I’ve been sending for over six years (sometimes two times a season), so I got that going for me.  It also broke a long dry spell of rejections. And then, just before bed last night, I received word that my “Ode to Paul Bunyan” will debut at The Collagist sometime in the near future. It feels like a good slap in the face to have all that waiting pay off, though of course, the waiting commences again.

Today River and I had some fab time down at North Beach, walking, talking, climbing over rocks and generally grooving with our rubber boot/sweater combos. It was the highlight of the last week for sure. He’s really in his element out there—focused, calm and patient. I bet we’ll pass many a rainy afternoon there this winter.

Boat School starts soon and I’m nearly ready. Just a grant to finish up, a handful of submissions to mail, and a few inaugural pizzas to bake in that almost-done-oven. Bear with me, Bear.  PS — My wife is awesome, and she didn’t tell me to say that, I promise.

I was on a bus, some version of a Bread-Loaf-last-night in which a party was being held. Yes, it was a party bus. We were lining up to read a poem a piece, but I had left my paper elsewhere. “I know the poem,” I thought and made my way to the front. I begin reciting, accurately, my poem “Elegy with a Rope in It,” lingering on each line while the next was recalled from an unpracticed deep memory. But toward the end, the last four lines, I became subtly aware of the dream—only realizing this minutes later when I really woke—and I composed, in the dream, four lines which felt, in the dream, like four good lines. The only one I remember was the last: “I live to wait for this waiting.”

I suppose it’s been done before: Coleridge claimed that Kubla Khan—one of my favorite Romantic poems—was written in a dream, though he was deep in an opium stupor. The only gauze in my head came in through the window in the form of the Port Townsend winds.

Apparently, the traditional gift for a fifth anniversary is something made of wood. Well, I guess I got our wooden arbor up just in time to celebrate five years of marriage to my beautiful wife, Elie.

Five years ago this morning we had breakfast with friends before a casual walk through the ceremony. There was the talk with my father, walking down the gravel road together; there was the scene of heightened emotion in Elie’s “dressing room.” And then there was us, walking down the steps from my grandparents’ cabin, arriving at the edge of Long Lake, facing a hundred friends and family members. They looked out and over our shoulders at the lake’s unspooling distance, at the trees’ rise.

At one point I played guitar and we sang, leading everyone in a version of Greg Brown’s “Sprind Wind.” There were the little fumbles that made it real and raw and not too orchestrated. And suddenly, we were paddling off in an 85-year-old wood canvas canoe with our people, and one part of our life, behind us. It was surreal to arrive beyond the island and face each other, the weight of all we’d promised right there in the boat. I think we both cried a little, smiling. And then we turned around and headed back toward all those smiling faces and waiting arms.

Elie had asked me to marry her in that same boat on that same lake a year earlier during my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary—that lake that has been in my family’s history for well over a hundred years. And the spot we stood as we joined our lives was not incidental either. It was the same patch of ground where my parents were married 26 years before us.

Our life together has been good, deepened by the addition of River. It, and we, will continue to grow, for which I am thankful. Elie is a marvelous lady; I am a lucky man.

The twig fence is all but done and today the arbor went up. I think it looks great and it feels like the best kind of door—one that is easy to pass through and, I would say, one that leads into a great place.

Thanks to my lovely, giving wife, I’ve been okayed to spend this month’s mornings hard at work on my writing. So far I’ve submitted work to about a dozen places in the past few days (all individually tailored), which means I still have about 30 subs to go. Afternoons are spent in the yard, digging up roots, planting, working on the pergola, fence and more. Today I picked up a bunch of bricks from a neighbor for a great price and plan to start working on the wood-fired oven I meant to build two years ago. I think I’ll have it up and cooking in two or three week’s time.

Overall, life is busy but good. River seems happy; Elle seems happy; I’m happy for the most part. If I keep on this path, I’ll kick off the writing season with a bang, have our new place in order and be ready to start boat school at the beginning of October. If you are in the area, come visit!