A winter yurt?

William Coperthwaite’s A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity uses some Emily Dickinson poems, as well as a touch of Thoreau and Emerson and D. H. Lawrence, to help celebrate a close-to-the-earth life. Mr. Coperthwaite lives in a yurt (a nomadic shelter native to the Mongolian steppes) on the north coast of Maine: a level of “simplicity” that borders on “brutal” and “masochistic”. (I live in Minnesota, where we have some pretty impressive winters, and my roots are in Maine, where backwoods antics are often practiced, and the thought of living through a northern winter in a yurt strikes me as equally inspirational and terrifying.)

I’m not sure that Emily Dickinson would have given up her Amherst home for a yurt, even in the summer, but I can imagine her paying Mr. Coperthwaite a visit. Perhaps with an ample serving of her black cake and some of the brandy that she no doubt reserved from the recipe: 8 pounds of dried fruit might not get you through the winter, but with a pint of brandy it might manage February…