Yes, Yurts!

When I started dating Brent, he lived in a tipi. It was then that I discovered the feeling of wholeness that comes from sleeping in a round dwelling. There is something indescribable about looking up and seeing tipi poles coming together and reaching towards the sky. It's been a long time since we spent a night in the tipi though, preferring the creature comforts of a cozy bed and a nearby bathroom especially when the kids were little.

But the kids are getting bigger now and we find that we are beginning to have time to really explore the things that interest us. Or maybe the time is the same but we are different. I'm not sure. But several weeks ago I remembered the beautiful pictures I had seen of modern yurts. I went surfing and found some like I was thinking of at Pacific Yurts and Colorado Yurts.

I showed them to Brent and said that maybe we should start making plans for the next phase of life; with one in high school getting his first summer job and the others growing up so quickly, we will be empty nesters before we know it. It seems that the last 10 years have passed in the blink of an eye. While I sometimes wish I could pin down time and make it stop, I really do enjoy watching my kids grow into interesting big people. While they are figuring out what path they will take, we are thinking a lot about what we will do when it's just us. Since some of our kids came to our marriage with me, we've never had a time that was just "Brent & Beth." It's hard for us to imagine. But part of making this transition easier for us as we let them grow is for us to plan what we would like to focus on as we move towards that time.


I asked Brent if maybe he would like to find that piece of land in the country that we are always dreaming of and put a yurt on it. I am drawn to the yurt because it has the round roof much like the tipi that I remember so fondly from our early days together. But it has a floor and can be easily adapted to include luxuries, like beds, bathrooms and a kitchen sink. Plus is it more impervious to things that should stay outdoors; like mosquitoes and frogs. It's easy to say that these things aren't so important...until you spend a night with stomach flu in the woods or wake up in a tipi with a frog on your face! The yurt looks like the best of both worlds to me.


Brent reminded me that he had heard of a place with yurts that you can stay in. This captured my attention and I wanted to know if there was a place we could lie awake and look at the moon through the dome in the roof. I thought that would be as close to idyllic as possible. It turns out Brent was right, you can stay in a yurt at Mary Rose Herb Farm. We called to make a reservation right away and I looked forward to 48 hours of just us under the moon.