We is all getting along up here ok what with us getting a garden all up and going. We have us a fierce amount of corn at Daddy’s behest. Momma done snuck some other seeds in there so we can have something what ain’t yellow all the time. They’s beans which is what she chose and Jacob got to choose a thing to plant too and he picked beets since it makes your poops red and he thinks that’s the funniest thing ever. For my choice I picked tomatoes for I like spaghetti a lot and I heard tell that’s one of the things what is needed to make sauce for spaghetti, only I ain’t exactly sure how it goes in there. Only thing I know is we ain’t get no cans of spaghetti sauce up here in these woods.

Daddy done taken care of the inside of the house and it ain’t so bad as it once was what with nothing covering the doors so we could all see each other all the time. We have our couch so we can all look at the T.V. when we run out of things to do. The power still ain’t work up here yet although heard tell Daddy is in cahoots with Uncle next door to suck the power off the lines for free what run through the woods in a big empty swath like it was cut by a giant lawnmower. It still ain’t come to no fruition and Daddy says them wires is hot enough to cook a bird into a black char if they took a notion to resting on one for too long. He ain’t want to burn both of his arms off, so we’s been canning what all we get from the garden and eating up everything we kill out here before it goes to spoiling. For T.V., we take turns cutting out pictures we all like from the magazines. We lick the back sides of them and slap them on the T.V. screen so they stick real good and if you watch the pictures long enough, you can about see them move a little bit. Just like watching T.V. for real.

Jacob and Me's room is fixed up real good now. We have our separate beds, and I have a little board shelf over my bed Daddy hammered into the wall that I can show my finds in the woods. Jacob got a poster over his bed of a basketball player, name of Michael Jordan, and we ain’t quite for sure who that is, but heard tell from just about anyone you ask that he’s the best there is at putting a basketball where it needs to go, which is good, I guess. Momma and Daddy’s room is small and we ain’t allowed to go in there unless they ask for us to get something or other out of it, and even then, we have to do it fast fast for Momma and Daddy like their privacy. It’s small out here so there ain’t too much privacy going around except for in the woods, and they’s only sticks and logs out there and is great fun, but sometimes you want to be inside.

That garden come up faster than anyone thought and even sprouted some extras we all couldn’t eat ourselves. Momma and Daddy do a little trading with neighbors, and we get us some chicken eggs from a close by man what got him a little trailer what he sits in all day in a chair that’s gone brown with his behind grease. Daddy ain’t ever take us there on account of how seedy Daddy says he is. He has interests in the same things Mitch the Bitch’s Grandpa did and I’m OK with Daddy not bringing us over there, for the sound of it makes me mighty uneasy.

We get us some things to eat from time to time in the shape of bloody fur animals that Daddy chops up on a stump with a hatchet when they is shot through by me, and although Cole said you can kill something as big as a deer with the gun he give us, we ain’t seen no deer around here and only a few squirrels and a skunk once. I ain’t trying to kill no skunk and eat its smelly meat, so when I saw it, I never told nobody and just let it go. I’m a pretty good shot with this here gun and have been practicing on the wildlife so we can toss something meaty into our guts. Daddy gives it a try sometimes too, but mostly he misses what all he’s aiming at and anyway, he’s set on pondering how we can make this property even better. Jacob is jealous that he cain’t shoot this gun, but after we got back from Cole, Daddy set down the law that I was the main hunter and he ain’t want nobody to waste no ammunition for he ain’t even quite sure to get more of it.

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We was aware of school where all the kids go every day, and it ain’t too far from where our house is according to where Daddy done dropped off the wolf dog, but Daddy says he done school already and it’s a waste of time and even though Jacob is ten and I’m seven and both school age, we ain’t never gone and rely on Daddy to teach us the outside school and Momma to teach us the inside school. So I expect that’s enough for I don’t have nothing else to base it on. We have us a few books with hard words in them, and I’m expected to know how to read them and know what they mean, and Jacob is expected to know what all the whole book means and is working on his letters and writing about the books themselves while I get the hang of just looking at the letters and doing well enough with that. Momma teaches us while she takes them growing things from the garden and puts them in cans so the food don’t just die outside on the ground. Oftentimes, we is all in the kitchen doing inside school while she has her back turned and is every once in a while burning her hands in a cloud of steam over the stove.

After we do our inside learnings, Daddy sometimes has time for us to do the outside learnings. That’s chopping wood for Jacob and stacking wood for me, since I ain’t strong enough to cut through wood yet. Daddy says that’ll happen soon enough, then I can graduate to first rate wood chopper, and Jacob can graduate to building things out of wood and writing numbers so the wood fits together.

We all have us a routine and we is eating well enough now and we know some things what can be eaten from the woods direct, mostly by trial and error but we know to avoid the red mushrooms, and not to try to eat no bark even though it looks delicious. There’s some green plants what taste peppery, and I ain’t sure what they all are called but sometimes they is OK eating if you pile enough squirrel gravy on them.

Time is passing by and this is maybe what Daddy wanted after all. To have enough time to pass, but sometimes he misses getting special things from the town, like what was easier to get when we were directly in there. He and Momma take trips back there although less frequently since we is getting to where we have everything we need up here and when they do go to town, they leave us behind, and as long as Jacob and me do our chores, we can do whatever we want. That usually involves playing with sharp things like knives, or axes, and setting little fires out in the wilderness like camping, even though we is pretty much camping all the time if you think about it.

We explore the area some and we know where all uncle’s house is of course, but there’s some spots on our property here we can spy on the mysterious other people what live up here too, but only through the limbs of trees as their houses is pretty well tucked inside the woods, much like our house is. We ain’t lean much about them other than they got a roof what is metal too and they burn wood, just like everyone else up here.