The self-inventing writer slash hair cutter slash jeweler slash "osteoempathetic" healer Oren Pierce lives less than a mile down through the woods from here, in a rented, concrete silo that someone once almost finished converting to comfortable living quarters.
He calls it "Cayuga Tower" because it's very near the lake, but it's in a barnyard long ago abandoned, even by the barn, and so over-grown with Buckthorn, Juniper, and Pear that he can't see the lake for the trees; he can't even see the sky from his Cayuga tower.
Wiring runs in and out of the windows, and twists up the silo along with Woodbine and Poison Ivy vines thick as your wrist. I don't know of any plumbing. A depression in the yard with cattails growing at the bottom is either a failed dug-pond or a sump hole. Or both.
It's cold comfort there in the tower, so when we go away, Oren happily comes up here to look after our place and stay in the back-yard trailer with a sky-viewing cupola and the comfy bed downstairs that converts to a bath tub. He says he writes well there. Maybe in the bathtub.
Lately Oren has been publishing stories about a pale-faced, sort-of bear whose father (according to her Black Bear Mother's early stories) is a Polar Bear; although Mother Bear later confesses that Nowella's father was a White Man. Owen Pierce's stories keep reminding us of this naked fact. But oftn in the stories, what we have here seems to be nothing more than a trunk full of stuffed animals … and the scale of these creatures shifts unsettlingly, at least for simple understanding. Clearly not stories for children, unless they are haunted children.
.
