Connell Sanders: It's time for a yurt alert!

I write to you from a yurt, deep in the woods, tucked between a meadow and an orchard. Don’t try to find me. 

There’s something very peaceful about getting “outside the radius” from time to time. I have no one to impress here. Just my husband, my daughter and a fluffle of rabbits. 

Given the choice, I’ll take nature’s majesty over a fancy resort vacation any day. I’m fairly certain it’s genetic. My mother, for example, has dreamed of living in a yurt for as long as I can remember. 

I teased her at first. “Do you really plan to spend your retirement in a tent?” I asked. She insisted a yurt was different, rounder, more sturdy, and above all, culturally significant; yurts date back 3,000 years in Central Asia. Why this is a pertinent selling point for a middle-aged Irish woman like my mother, I am still not sure. Nevertheless, when the opportunity arose to stay in a yurt, I jumped at the chance. 

The allure didn’t fully register until we arrived here. Our accommodations are comfortable. We have running water, a wood stove and electricity. More importantly, I found a volume of Emily Dickinson poems on the bookshelf. The first page reads: “The maple wears a gayer scarf, the field a scarlet gown. Lest I should be old-fashioned, I’ll put a trinket on.” 

We took Emily’s advice and bundled up to walk through the wildflower fields at sunset. “Is the world ending?” My husband asked me. The sky was aflame. 

Back inside, the yurt was positively cozy. “I am beginning to understand why my mom is so obsessed with building one of these things,” I admitted. Even so, I wondered how cold it could get in the dead of winter and how lonely it must feel out here when the novelty of isolation wears off.

Ms. Dickinson would have loved the seclusion. Scholars estimate she only left her hometown three times over the course of her life. She wrote about the ordinary details of her day to day existence and traveled in her imagination. Emily relished anonymity and solitude. More than 1,700 of her poems were discovered after her death. She is now considered one of the most important figures in American literature.

Escaping west of Worcester always reminds me of Emily. This weekend, I’m happy to be “nobody” like she who wrote, “How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog, to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog!”

Before we go home, we will hike to a waterfall and eat apples off the trees. We will sip mugs of coffee on the stone patio and watch for sparrows. We will read poetry to our daughter up in the loft and tell her how proud nana is that she spent the night in a yurt. Then, we will drive home and as we pass by Emily’s hometown, I will roll down the window and “spread wide my narrow hands to gather Paradise” and remember how lucky I am to travel beyond my imagination with the ones I love most. 

The yurt at Climbing Vine Cottage is available on Airbnb. Do you have a favorite glamping recommendation? Find me on Instagram and let me know at @sarah_connell.