I was out of town during the Solstice last week, and after getting home late last night I felt that my house was missing something related to the season. I hadn’t felt like doing much holiday decorating up until now, but today it was grey and rainy. All I wanted was some light and a reminder that despite it being the official beginning of winter, every living thing around will begin to respond to the now-lengthening days with new growth.

I put on my boots and walked the woods behind my house until I found a little cedar tree that would serve to celebrate both the Solstice and Christmas. I passed by many lusher, more evenly formed saplings, as they were well-positioned to grow into lovely trees. Instead of one of these more perfect specimens I selected a tree growing at the wood line with most of its branches on one side reaching toward the light—fitting for a Solstice tree.

It was growing in the shadow of a nice tulip poplar, and as tulip polars are the main source of nectar for the declining honeybee population around here, I figured I’d eliminate one of the poplar’s competitors. So with a few strokes of the saw, down came the cedar, and I dragged it home across the field.

Along the way I saw a few exquisite things, the first being this snail. After a week in big cities, including Manhattan, marveling at exclusively man-made beauty with nary a natural thing in sight, spying this perfect snail in the damp field almost made me cry with the relief and comfort of being home.

Then I checked up on the deer skull that’s been lying in this same spot ever since I moved here four years ago. The first year it was blazing white among the leaves, but each year the skull gets grayer and more of its nose is eaten off by rodents, giving it an ever more human profile. It’s a memento mori if I ever saw one.

Back home, my scrawny little cedar’s trunk was too small to fit in my Christmas tree stand. I screwed a few blocks of scrap wood to its trunk to pad it out enough to fit the stand.

Then I carried it inside and straightened it as well as one could a tree with a scoliotic trunk.

I tossed two strands of mini lights around the cedar, filled the holder with water, and threw a couple of old wool rugs around the base. My tree is free, free-range, sparse, crooked and lovely. Instead of balsam, it smells like cat pee. But it’s a reminder of light and life during these dark days, and this year it is all that I wanted.

One of the things I like best about the farm is that the sun sets behind the woodline at the back of my property, and behind the soft mountains that are beyond the woods.  In the winter, the silhouettes of trees—including the gigantic oak right behind the house—throw up a stark background that’s not unlike an expertly lit stage set. I like being out here as the stars wheel into place above me, and I like feeling small under those giant trees.

My house is certainly not large by anyone’s description. It’s a cozy country cottage. The original home was 1,300 square feet. I’ve added a second story that, and I am guessing here instead of scaling off my plan, may add another 500-700 square feet. But what I’ve noticed in the process of taking the original house down, staring a new foundation in the face, and building back up again is that my sense of the size of the home is elastic through each of these stages. Paradoxically, when the house was a big hole in the ground, only a crawlspace really, it felt tiny. I looked at the hole and thought wow, maybe I should have broken the confines of the existing foundation and expanded. Then the floor deck went up, and the first floor framing. And the new rooms felt alarmingly small. But then tonight, when I walked in the house, something was different. The rooms were boxed in with a roof, the new deck for the second floor, and yet they felt larger. Can anyone explain this phenomenon?

Anyway, the photo above is shot from the living room looking into the kitchen, which will have a vaulted ceiling with two skylights. The big opening is for a set of French doors that will go out onto the screened porch.

My plan originally had the living room and kitchen divided by walls with five-foot pocket doors to create two separatable rooms, just like the entry to the library. But I asked my builder to hold off on those stub walls while I see how I liked the space as it is. I guess open-concept homes are all the rage, but I am not yet convinced I want to look at my dishes and stove while sitting on the couch in the living room. Thoughts? The door framed to the right of the photo above goes into the guest bedroom.

Here’s a part of the house I am very excited about. The new front hall! This space was really the genesis for the entire remodel, etc., as the original house didn’t have a defined entry. I love front hallways, and have an image in my head of a beautiful space with a hall table, mirrors, sconces, etc. A place of transition from the interior of the home to the outside world. So I had the idea to sacrifice one of the bedrooms of the original house to cut in a front hall, centered on the fireplace. That plan snowballed to include a powder room, coat closet, and eventually, a staircase to the new second floor. The photo above shows the powder room, which will nestle in the crook of the staircase. A crazy little cut up space, just enough room for a tiny sink and commode.

The gigantic silver maple, as seen out a guest room window, is starting to turn gold. Just beyond is one of my two new Hinoki cypress, which had lived for years in whiskey barrels on my parents’ deck. They grew so pot bound that I decided to set them free in the earth. Which meant two days of playing on tractors and heavy equipment to move them to my house and get them planted (including my maiden voyage driving my dad’s new one-ton diesel dualie). Whee!

Stay tuned for roof framing very soon–that’s where things will get exciting because it will be so vastly different from the original home.