Jill took this photo last year [early 1990's].
Our neighbors on the west keep horses, which enjoy the run of an old apple orchard. I like to go visit them, but have to bring carrots or something other than apples, since they are tired of apples.
In this photo, I am feeding a friends large horse which also has the run of an old apple orchard, except in this case it over the border in Canada.
Jill likes to work with clay, as well as a legal secretary for a lawyer in nearby Sandpoint, Idaho. In this photo she is in the studio, which is wood heated and has electricity (not all do, up this way). The wood stove can be a problem when we take trips in the winter, because all of the clay can freeze by the time we get back so we have to thaw it out for two or three days before working with it. When this picture was taken, there was two feet of snow on the root, which helps keep the place warmer until the stove heat escapes into the attic and warms up the metal roof. Then the snow falls off the roof, and more wood is needed to keep the place cozy.
Right now the studio is filled with tools and piles of drawings for the straw bale house. It will be nice, after the house is finished to get it back into working order but for now a dry place with a roof and a stove is a real luxury and we're glad to have it for the construction effort.
This is our garden fence in deep winter. Jill, in her red jacket, is bird-watching, for woodpeckers which stay on our land in winter. We have a small swamp area with huge old aspens (old growth) which support a nesting pair of Pileated woodpeckers. And a number of other woodpeckers stay here, sometimes pecking on the outside of the house in the quiet of a snowfall. Many times I have thought I had a visitor tapping on the door.
Note the height of the fence, which is necessary to keep deer from jumping over it and eating up the garden in the summer. The fence also keeps out black bear which like the berries, and moose which roam through fairly regularly. The moose come up from the Pack River, cross overland through the woods and cut through our place on their way to the islands nearby.
