Jim and Tina Mozelle Braziel were both writers living and working in Birmingham when they courted and married. Jim was at the time raising a teenage son and his rent was almost half of his monthly salary. The pair decided, in order to have a life together, a writing life, they needed to build a home, themselves, and avoid rent and, if possible, a mortgage.
Jim found a piece of land, ten acres, for 6,000 dollars, which they named Hydrangea Ridge, northwest of Birmingham. It is a beautiful spot and the land came cheap—for a reason. There was no available water nearby and drilling a well would be too expensive and probably unreliable. Nevertheless, they set to work building a house together, by hand, in hot weather and cold. “Glass Cabin” is the story of that project.
It began with clearing the plot needed. They did get electricity. There were too many trees for solar—and they would never cut them down anyway. Whenever possible they used repurposed, free materials. The foundation is sixteen sections of old utility poles put laboriously into hand-dug holes in the unyielding chert. One wall is made of used tin, donated by a friend. The other walls are sheets of glass that had protected stained glass windows in a church.
It was their intention all along to live among the wildlife, not eliminate it—and that included deer, hawks, butterflies, yes, and turkey vultures: also wasps, ticks, chiggers, coyotes and snakes. It was hard! The first winter, before the roof and walls were complete, they lived in a tent on the subfloor. Heat came from a woodstove.
Early on, these writers knew this remarkable story had to be documented. And so we have this singular book. “Glass Cabin” is marketed as poetry and it mostly is, but the sections by Tina, the poet, are lyric poems, free verse and accessible, while some sections by Jim are more discursive, explanatory. Both have contributed sections that are prose poems: lyrical, denser than nonfiction, but not too formal or demanding.
The alternating contributions are mainly about the task at hand but, from time to time, they write to each other, what one can easily call love poems, about what they are doing, feeling. A lot of it has to do with water. Jim hauls a 250-gallon tankful in the back of the truck, up the mountain. It must be used sparingly. No waste. Dishwater goes to the plants and garden. The humans use a composting toilet.
Yes, one can learn here how to build a cabin from scratch and scraps, but most readers will just enjoy the story of these two: trusting one another, betting on themselves, working in harmony in nature, producing a companion piece to Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and Thoreau’s “Walden” but as a loving couple, not as a solitary witness.
Glass Cabin
