So there's me and John and our friend, Jacob, in a yurt in the middle of the forest. There are about 40 candles burning and the sound of rain falling on the tarp that protects us. It is warm and clean and we are eating bacon. We have been reading three-part medieval music by candlelight for hours, drinking mead and 2-buck chuck. I have been playing around with Jacob's hurdy gurdy, which is at least one hundred and fifty years old, loud and addictive to play, even though I have invented my own kind of cadence by missing my note over and over again. We are on the outskirts of Camlann medieval village, where Jacob makes masks and backdrops for plays, and for which he tries to recreate dances from pictures. Jacob would like to make a puppet of a pig wearing a henin* and walking on stilts, but henins didn't come about until the 14th century, he says, and the village is a 13th century one. The forest is in one of those places where there is no shield from the rain, so it's very verdant and wet all of the time. The woods smell uncannily of scented heliotrope, which is my favorite smell in the whole world.
Today, I got a couple of tiny house plants, which I hope will grow into great big ones. I have named them Sappho and Lusk.
*conical medieval hat
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