Well, I guess I have never lived in the most normal of places. In fact, my parents built the house I grew up in and I’ve lived here my whole life…in the middle of the forest, that is. Yeah, I live in the sort of place where it’s a rarity to get any cars coming along the road, so you wave to them all (because either it’s someone who came to your baptism as a baby or they have the devil for a GPS and it’s trying to take them off the face of the earth). So, yeah, I hike and read and write a lot because there aren’t too many people to talk to out here (and the ones who do live out here are basically a bunch of introverts who only communicate with one another to warn each other about the big old 400-pound bear that’s making rounds to people’s bird feeders). And, yup, that’s Hartland, Conn. for you!

The only real thing we’re known for is for being the Moose capital of Connecticut (yeah, moose are great, they’re like a bunch of clumsy, gangly teenagers). Hartland has approximately two public buildings, those being our white little non-denominational church which only the real old-timers go to anymore, and the tiny public library (about the size of your average '50s kitchen). We used to have a post office, but that got shut down a ways back because they decided our town of about 500 people was too small to have its own post office and so we all have to lie about where we live and put our mailing addresses as Riverton, the next town over, which has a post office (wonder of wonders!).

So, my whole childhood essentially consisted of constructing fairy houses, waiting patiently for the birds to think I was a statue so they’d come eat the birdseed off of my head and hands, and trying to capture chipmunks in small woven cages I constructed out of twigs and vines (I never did catch one of them, sadly). Over the years, I have encountered quite a few deep-forest animals, including a pack of baby bobcats one winter (they were absolutely precious!), numerous black bears (once there was a momma bear with five cubs, very unusual!), and several porcupines, red-bellied woodpeckers (they look almost prehistoric), great horned owls, flying squirrels (they always end up in our basement somehow) and of course, quite a few moose.

Currently, we have a big old 400-pound black bear roaming the neighborhood eating all the birdseed and tipping over garbage cans, a young porcupine (who ate all our petunias last summer when he was a baby, but has now developed a taste for our hemlock tree’s branches), and, most exciting of all, a pair of mated robins who have constructed a nest in a small pine tree right outside of one of our windows and whose four eggs have all hatched and produced the ugliest little pink baby birds you’ve seen! It’s been great watching them grow up, and I honestly feel as proud as the momma robin must, keeping track of all their little victories (five days ago they started lifting their heads, two days ago they started squawking and today they opened their little eyes!). So, that’s my life, folks. Yeah, it’s a little odd, but I really love being able to see the constellations at night (no light pollution out here) and smell fresh, clean air every morning, feeling the dew between my bare feet. It’s really taught me to respect and enjoy nature as a whole, giving me an invaluable experience growing up. So, yeah, basically, I’m an actual forest nymph and that’s my story.