It is not home yet

Our juniper cottage

With its symmetric second floor

And never-pruned hydrangea plants

Is up a great hill

And off the main way

From an Olympic-mountain-viewing HOA haven

Of spot the difference puzzle houses

Adorned here with rotting Halloween pumpkins

And there with early Christmas wreaths.

We are both out West and up North,

Nearly as far as this country can take us,

But there are no ten gallon hats,

There are no ponds thickened to ice,

There’s just rain.

Still it is a new kind of magic

To wake up to fog rushing your window

Like steam from a boiling over pot,

And looking up before sunset-

To notice only the peaks’ air has thinned

And the powdered sugar mountain tops

Are beckoning again.

We have chatty squirrels in our trees

That speak their mind while we stack logs out back.

We keep two cereal bowls in the yard  

Unsure, still, if we’re sustaining

The shy abandoned cat our neighbors warned us of,

Or the family of plump racoons we spied

Our very first day of arrival.

It is not home yet.

But we are filling its inside

Slowly with things old and new,

With smoke from the wood stove,

With the smell of fresh breads in the oven,

With imprints of our bodies, our hands

Across every surface.

And each day the place grows more familiar:

Which stairs creek the loudest,

All those corners where paint has chipped,

Where my husband hides the dish rags…

It is not home yet,

But it will be.