This is the Yurt that Kevin Built

The picture that forms the background of this blog's header is of the yurt that we will be trading for a small house in a small town with a third of an acre attached.

I hate packing, but this time it's different. Moving out of the Rowling* estate was a nightmare because the Rowling family is weird and set my teeth on edge. Moving out of the second McArthur apartment cost sixty dollars at the laundromat to wash the black mold out of all the linens. Moving out of the Cooper residence was like being hit on the head with one of those huge, bouncy mallets in that arcade game where you bonk the groundhogs because the Cooper family, their freinds, and their realtors are all wierd and set my teeth on edge, AND it cost sixty bucks to wash the fleas out of the linens., AND I left my one family hierloom--Granma R's rolling pin--in a kitchen drawer.

But this time I'm moving out of the first home my husband built. It's like I lost one-hundred pounds and was still wearing my old clothes, all that time I spent in all those square rooms.

There are several factors that make yurt-living ideal for me. The first is, it's so naturally beautiful. The symmetry of the red-painted frame against canvas is elegance itself. I admire well-appointed homes and the people who appoint them, but I do not have their talent, and I hate spending the money. Our apartments always looked as if they had been just moved into yesterday.

Along the same line, I seemed only able to keep one room clean at a time. If the kitchen sparkled, it was because the bedroom was a disaster area. A yurt only has one room. One floor to sweep, with the bed right there--no shutting the door on it and forgetting that it is unmade.

Most of all, a yurt is simple. I like a revolver because I can see with my own eyes how it works. Semi-automatics are ugly as all the sins you can commit with them, but I don't like them because, for all I know, they work by magic. With a revolver, though, there's no hiding the fall of the hammer, the spinning of the cylinder: it requires no faith. I feel the same about the yurt. Houses are full of mysterious pipings and wirings hidden in the walls and under the floors. You think you know what's going on, but do you really? How much do you know about the state of your roof, right now, no peeking? If you don't know about your roof, you don't know about your foundation, and if you don't know about your foundation, what do you know?

So, no, I don't want to move out of my yurt, but I won't be missing it for long. Because a third of an acre? Plenty of room for another yurt.

*Names have been changed