[With a sandhill crane colt I rescued from Tater Tot’s maw, on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, Idaho]

Well, heck.  I’ve been here, there and everywhere since the start of May and I am home tonight at the strawbale house on the Snake River for a few days before I take one more trip.  Then it will be July and I will drop anchor in Idaho and do a little working, loving and living in this state I adore.  I am road weary, quite sick and I feel hugely divorced from my creative habit (which is something I have uttered here before, but it’s worth uttering again tonight as I dig deep into work under a setting sun, trying — in vain — to make up some ground).

I stepped outside with a cold drink to check on the gardens.  Mostly everything has sprung up taller than tall with the recent heatwave and I yanked a few tenacious weeds while I perused what will become our food and I listened to the rapids roaring beneath the house and the yellow-wing blackbirds howling at the edge of the current and I felt quiet inside for the first time in weeks.

Besides all of my travels, my work, my traveling for work, relocating the Airstream to McCall for the fire season and bouncing all over Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Alaska with my cameras…we bought a farm a couple weeks ago.

Yes.  We bought a farm.  In the midst of everything.  I don’t know what to tell you except it felt perfectly right — the land, the house, the alfalfa fields, the huge outbuilding that could store four or five Airstreams, the orchard, the fish pond, the locust trees, the massive weeping willow, the space that will be my metal studio (it’s made mostly of glass)…

Finding this place was very unexpected, though we have been shopping for so long.  All this time, it was right under our noses.

I’ll tell you all about it soon.

But first, I will regale you with some images and words from my travels these past five weeks of my life.

Stay tuned.

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