Most of the contents of my city house have been packed away now.

We’ve been on these naked 22 acres for a week. A very large, very dry tent is our new home. It has a bedroom and a spacious front room that I use as a kitchen. We dug a fire pit, bought a few coolers to store food. A Coleman two burner stand up camping stove feels like a luxury. My silver forks and spoons, cloth napkins, linen table cloth, my favorite ancient wooden spoon and a couple of good knives and a little pile of ironstone vessels were essentials. A sturdy garden table and two chairs sit on an old kilim. Late night entertainment is the moon and stars. We cozy up to the fire and tell each other our dreams. We are comfortable.

My go-to article of clothing is an oversized vintage cashmere turtleneck sweater that I bought at Moon and Arrow on 4th Street in Philadelphia, and an equally oversized pair of frog green rain boots that I can slip into and out of effortlessly.

Tom and I work together with ease. All of our actions are slow and deliberate.

Gathering wood for the morning fire is a meditation. Making coffee is a prayer. Fetching water is an all day affair. Doing dishes requires boiling a vat of water. It takes a long time to do all the simple things that running hot watering and indoor plumbing hasten forward.

There is something so awful and wonderful about crawling out of bed in the middle of the night into the cold dark air. Necessary. I slip into my too-big rain boots, pull on my cashmere sweater and grab a wad of TP. I find a good spot, squat and trickle. The position and the release feels primal. If I splash the rain boots protect me. But the real joy, the thing that makes leaving my bed worth it, is looking up and seeing the black sky thick with stars. No light pollution, no pollution of any kind actually. I can still smell smoke hanging in the air from the last of the fire’s embers.