Sunday, December eighth.
Log cabins stuffed with moss should be wonderful in the tropics. I’m about frozen. On this work table I must weight my papers down to keep them from flying about the room. And the wind is icy; it is bitterly, bitterly cold. Olson says we need expect no colder weather than this all winter. Of course we don’t really mind it. The stove is red hot and we may go as close to it as we please, and the bed is warm—except towards morning. At night I move my jugs of yeast and cider toward the stove, fill the “air-tight” to the top, pile blankets and wrappers upon the bed, and sleep happily.
The gale still rages, fortunately not with its utmost fury. This morning Rockwell and I hurried through our chores and then climbed to the low ridge of the island. The snow in the woods is crusted and bore us up well so that we traveled with ease and soon reached the crest. Ah, there it was glorious; such blue and gold and rose! We looked down upon the spit and saw the sea piling upon it; we looked seaward and saw the snow blown from the land, the spray and the mist rising in clouds toward the sun,—and the sun, the beautiful sun shone on us. We took a number of pictures and then with numbed fingers and toes raced down the slope playing man-pursued-by-a-bear. Rockwell was wonderful to look at with his cheeks so red and clear. He loved our little excursion.
And for the rest of the day we’ve worked. I stretched and coated three large canvases, hateful job! painted, sawed wood, felled a tree—which the wind carried over onto another so that there it hangs neither up nor down,—and that’s about all. It’s again eleven and time for bed. The night is beautiful even if it is terrible; and the young moon is near setting.
MAN