A Place To Lay One's Head Descriptive Writing

A Place to Lay One’s Head
From my house up on the ridge, if the cottonwood leaves below have fallen away in the autumn, you can see another smallish house straddling the thin line of the village river. It is tucked between the river and cottonwoods on one side and the wild field that my father sometimes plants with corn, wheat and rye on the other. I started building it about five years ago right around Christmas break from school. It is a pit house so the beginnings of it really weren’t about building, but rather about digging. I remember the first couple of shovel fulls that winter. I was so desperate to create a little hollow for myself in the earth that I imagined I could plow through the layers of soil to dig down at least eight feet …show more content…
First, I dug through the two feet of topsoil where the Actinobacteria make its home releasing the earthy flavored Geosmin, then, the almost three full feet of pallid cold smelling subsoil and its variable mixture of small and inorganic particles, and finally, the hard substratum which made me lose my enthusiasm for digging any deeper. So, I turned instead to using a little garden trowel to carve out parts of a fire place on the east side of my pit house: the hearth, the firebox and then, with an earth rammer, the flue. My dad and I stuck in a chimney, flashing and a chimney cap to make it a real fireplace, and I was set in my little house with the still sky open above. Joaquin and Paul came out to help me sometimes on weekends, and as we sat resting from our dig, they would tell me all kinds of things about that place down by the river where the pit house was going: where the cinnamon bear left a steaming mass that fall, where the flood had changed the bend in the river ten years before or just pointing to a flicker and singing along mockingly with a song