The Kayla Series is a year-long, weekly narrative following the imagined first tenant of Oak Hollow Cabins’ Threshold Cabin. Each episode explores what happens when life is intentionally simplified and lived more slowly.
If this is your first visit, you may want to begin with the Introduction or Episode 1.
Kayla hadn’t planned to stop streaming anything.
It just… hadn’t happened.
The first night, it made sense. She was tired from the move, from the quiet, from learning how to keep a fire alive. The second night, she told herself she’d watch something after dinner, but the kettle boiled, the stove needed tending, and before she knew it, the lantern was dimmed and the room had gone still.
By the third night, she noticed.
Not in a dramatic way—no revelation, no declaration. Just a small, almost curious awareness: I haven’t turned anything on.
Back home, evenings had always ended the same way. A show to unwind. Another to fill the silence. Sometimes three episodes before she realized she was still holding her phone, thumb scrolling even as the screen played on without her attention.
It wasn’t indulgence so much as sedation.
Out here, the cabin offered no such automatic ending to the day. Darkness arrived without asking. Silence followed. The choice of what to do with herself remained unresolved.
The fourth night, restlessness crept in again—not the sharp kind from her first Saturday, but a subtler itch. She sat on the bed after dinner, boots kicked off, lantern glowing low. Her body waited for something familiar to begin.
Nothing did.
She stood and paced the small space once, then twice. She straightened a stack of firewood that didn’t need straightening. She picked up her journal, opened it, closed it again.
The urge surprised her—not for a specific show, but for the relief of being absorbed. Of having her attention gently hijacked so she wouldn’t have to decide what to think or feel.
She realized then how rarely she’d been alone with her evenings.
Not alone as in isolated—but unoccupied.
She lit the stove again even though the cabin wasn’t cold. Watched the flame catch, then settle. The fire didn’t perform. It didn’t escalate. It simply existed.
So did she.
The fifth night, she noticed her senses sharpening.
She heard the wind change direction. The soft tick of cooling metal on the stove. The faint hum of insects she hadn’t yet learned to name. Her thoughts still wandered, but they wandered without a soundtrack.
She thought about turning something on, just to see how it would feel.
She didn’t.
By the sixth night, something loosened.
She sat on the floor with her back against the bed, mug cooling beside her, journal open in her lap. She wasn’t writing steadily—just a sentence here, a line there. Long pauses between thoughts.
It struck her that streaming had never really been about entertainment.
It had been about avoiding the space between moments.
Without it, the evening stretched. Not empty, exactly—just unstructured. And in that stretch, memories surfaced without being summoned. Questions arose without being chased away.
She remembered how, years ago, she used to read until she fell asleep. How she once trusted her own interior life enough to sit with it. How noise had slowly replaced curiosity without her noticing.
She closed the journal and lay back on the floor, staring at the ceiling.
The lantern cast a warm, uneven light, shadows shifting gently as the flame breathed. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t interesting in the way screens were interesting.
It was enough.
On the seventh night, she realized the urge had softened.
Not gone—just quieter.
She didn’t feel deprived. She felt… unhooked.
Distraction, she understood now, wasn’t a villain. It had served her once. It had helped her survive busy seasons, emotional strain, long stretches of effort.
But it had overstayed.
She brewed tea and carried it to the window, looking out toward the Hearth. The path was familiar now, her feet knowing it even in low light. She thought of all the ways her days had begun and ended here—deliberately, with friction, with intention.
Streaming would be easy to bring back. The option wasn’t gone.
But something in her hesitated—not from discipline, but from discernment.
What would I be turning away from? she wondered.
The quiet no longer felt like something to fill.
It felt like something to protect.
She wrote one last line before bed:
I didn’t quit distraction. I outgrew it.
She closed the journal, dimmed the lantern, and lay down.
The night held.
No cliffhangers.
No autoplay.
No artificial ending.
Just a steady dark, a warm stove, and the slow return of her own attention—finding its way back to her, one evening at a time.
Oak Hollow Cabins 