CHAPTER ONE
         It was dawn, it was January, it was freezing.
         Last night’s storm was still blowing itself out in fitful gusts, and when I pulled the blankets down from my face, the air was so cold, my skin ached. There were ice crystals covering the insides of the windows, a layer of frost on the rough plywood floor. It was the winter of 1986. Not a good winter.
         In the woods behind the small unfinished outbuilding we euphemistically called ‘the cabin’, I could hear the deer making their way over the frozen ground. They came every morning just as the air lightened enough to show the outlines of all the things piled around us.
         I’d heard them first in early October, right after we moved in here, sounding more like a herd of elephants than deer and I’d run to the doorway to see what on earth was making such a racket.
         Startled, they bounded away through the trees, a symbol of everything that was right with this place…the untouched nature of it, the chance it offered for a less complicated, more self-sufficient lifestyle.
         We were still hopeful then.
         The days were warm, the sky a brilliant blue, the trees a mass of yellow orange red. And we were sure we could finish the house we were building enough to get into it before winter.
         I watched the deer bolt away that first morning, their tails high, surprised by my presence in a place where it was likely they’d never encountered anyone before, and I remember feeling ridiculously happy.
         But it was January now, and I wasn’t happy, ridiculously or any other way, and I had absolutely no desire to get up and look at deer. I lay there under five blankets and a sleeping bag, on top of sheets that hadn’t been washed in two months because clean sheets had gone the way of everything else that was too inconvenient or too tangential to house building to be even remotely important. I’d gone to bed wearing the same two pairs of socks, the same thermal underwear, the same turtleneck and sweat pants and sweatshirt I’d worn the day before, and probably the day before that and the day before that.
         Oh, I’d heard about country people donning winter underwear in November and not removing it until April or May, and once upon a time I’d had the proper wryly incredulous response to it. But wearing the same clothes for days or even months didn’t seem strange anymore, merely rational.
         I looked at the emerging shapes of my plants in the gray dawn light. They were the first thing I saw every morning—spiders, dracaenas, figs, ferns, succulents. Some, I’d nurtured ten years or more. Except now they were all dead. They’d died during the first minus thirty-degree night of the season, and what I needed to do was toss them all out into the snow. A simple thing. A few dozen heaves through a doorway with only a tarp and no door.
         For one thing we could use the space, and for another we had enough things to remind us of plans gone stark raving berserk without having to look at a bunch of dead plants every morning. But for some reason I hadn’t done it. I think I just didn’t have that kind of energy anymore. For throwing out dead plants, changing sheets, going to the Laundromat. I did other things now. We both did other things, Art and I. We measured and cut 2x4s, carried sheets of plywood up and down ladders, hauled bricks and cement blocks, hammered nails, drilled holes, pulled wire, searched wrecking yards for building materials, and tried to keep the water tank from freezing every night. We also tried to keep the bank from finding out that every payment of our construction mortgage was narrowly made.
         And every morning I stared at the silhouettes of my plants, their dead branches, their shriveled leaves, and wondered if and when we’d actually be able to complete this thing we’d begun and why for heaven’s sake we’d ever thought it was a good idea in the first place.
         Long before January, my plants were supposed to be thirty yards away in a warm cozy house with a wood stove and lots of windows. Art and I were supposed to be there, too, along with all the stuff piled to the cabin ceiling around the sofa bed. Furniture. Clothes. Boxes full of things we’d already forgotten we even owned.
         Lady, our Labrador Retriever, shifted her weight on the rug beside the sleep sofa, and I thought how this was no way for her to be spending her thirteenth winter. I reached down and pulled her blanket until it completely covered her. She opened one eye, looked up at me and sighed.
         The cabin had been the first thing we built, a place to store all our things until the house was finished. And moving into it from the tent where we’d spent the summer should have been a step up. Except once we started on the house, we never finished the cabin. So although it had a roof, walls, a floor, and a few mismatched windows, the eaves were still wide open, there was no door, no insulation, no electricity. Certainly no toilet, no running water, no heat.
         Back in October, none of these things had mattered. There were birds singing in the morning, the sun was still strong enough to feel warm on your skin, and the noise of deer behind the cabin at dawn was a wondrous thing.
Funny, the difference a degrees and a few months could make.
         Outside the tacked-in aluminum-framed window that rattled with every gust, the sky was growing lighter; inside, the shapes of all the boxes piled against the 2x4 stud walls were beginning to separate from the shadows. I could see the outline but not the content of an Eakins poster, although by now I didn’t have to see it to see it. It was a working study of a racing shell on the water, with the artist’s reference lines and perspectives, the only thing worth staring at inside the cabin. It was meant to be hanging in the house by now—framed and matted, a reflection of our taste, our style. Instead, it was hanging from a sixteen-penny nail, its corners curled, puckers running its length from the damp cold.
         Hanging it had been a sort of schizophrenic act...on one hand, an effort to introduce some grace into these primitive surroundings; and on the other, an admission that we were beyond all grace. That we’d blundered badly, made bad decisions based on little more than chutzpa and whimsy.
         And we weren’t kids. We should have known better.
         Between me and the poster, a Coleman lamp hung from the ceiling, looking like a tall man wearing a tall hat. It was the light Art read his students’ papers by, the light I’d written a half-dozen stories by. It even gave a bit of heat; which, if we had any sense of humor left, might have been funny...the idea of raising the air temperature immediately around the lamp from, say, twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit to thirty-five or even thirty-six.
         This had been the winter to beat all winters, a special message from the gods, and as a gust of wind left over from last night’s storm rattled the window, I wondered if the shell of the house had sustained any damage or if the braces had worked and the third floor walls were still standing. On this hilltop, a forty-mile per hour wind roared through the trees like a freight train. And the storms had come one after the other, through the fall and into the winter, until it seemed it was the wind’s specific intent to keep trying until it blew down at least part of the roofless skeleton sitting in the clearing.
         Experience said the shell was stronger than my perception of it, but there was something about the fact that all the studs, all the nails, all the angles holding the house together had been put there by us that tended to undermine my confidence. On one hand, everyone who knew something about it, told us we’d overbuilt. 2x6s instead of 2x4s; 6x6s instead of 4x4s. Still, I wasn’t convinced.
         Besides, the storms always seemed to happen when Art was off teaching and I was alone. The radio predicting gusts up to sixty. Me getting solo practice climbing ladders to the third floor, stepping from narrow stringer to narrow stringer with a flashlight under my arm, while I carried sixteen-foot 2x4s to brace the walls with.
         I hated heights.
         Art would be back from two days of teaching in Cambridge sometime later in the day. He’d have slept in a regular bed, used a toilet that flushed, taken showers with steamy hot water, eaten good hot meals, and mingled with people who talked about ideas and politics and where they were heading for vacation in February. A professor of literature and writing roughing it in the woods like Thoreau, but not enjoying it nearly as much.
         A shaft of sunlight formed a weak circle on the wall and I got out of bed. I couldn’t sleep past dawn anymore. Dawn brought light to work by, and there was too much to do to waste any of it staying warm under the covers—especially when night came crashing down at four o’clock every afternoon.
         At least sleeping fully dressed saved time.
         I pulled on my oversized blue down jacket, two pairs of gloves, yanked my frozen boots off the floor and put them on. I wasn’t due for a shower for another few days, when I’d drive to my oldest daughter’s college and stand under the dorm shower until my skin wrinkled. Until then, I’d look like any average street person. But there were no mirrors to record it so it didn’t really matter, and besides, vanity had gone the way of grace and clean sheets.
         I patted Lady. “You stay here,” I told her. She looked grateful.
         I walked down the wooden ramp connecting the pole-built cabin to the ground into a silent frigid world. The branches of a hundred trees were silhouetted against a gray sky, and when I emerged from the woods into the clearing, it was a relief to see that the house was still there, all of it. The gigantic blue tarps that were supposed to keep out the rain and snow and did almost no good at all flapped and cracked slowly in a wind gust.
         The tiny trailer where Lauren lived was off to the side. She was spending her junior year of high school in a way neither of us could have imagined. Her three brothers and sister were in warm dorm rooms from Washington state to Connecticut, but Lauren was stuck here in this mess along with us. The house she’d grown up in was gone, her childhood friends were far away, she’d attended three schools in two years. Like Art, she was gone today, staying at a friend’s house, getting a break.
With everything else that had gone wrong, it was Lauren’s predicament that bothered me most of all. Because a mother wasn’t supposed to do things like this to a daughter.
         But then I looked at the house, and as it did every morning, my mind let go of everything except all the things there were to do.
         Second story walls and ceilings, third story walls and a roof, second-hand windows to strip and install, exterior doors to build and hang, siding, stairs, interior framing, and then all the things we couldn’t even begin until the weather turned civil—plumbing, wiring, insulation, a chimney, bathrooms, a kitchen.
         Looking at the big picture always had the effect of paralyzing me. Where to start? Where to start?
         Construction debris lay all around—five months worth of cut stud ends, plywood sheets, slabs of blue rigid insulation frozen in the snow. Just beyond the debris were the surrounding woods. “At least you’ll never need a lawn mower,” someone had joked. But eventually something was going to have to be done about that, too. Because if we intended to make good on our passive solar plan, a lot of trees had to come down.
         That morning, though, clearing half an acre of land so the sun could reach windows that weren’t even installed was way way down on our list of priorities.
         I headed for the outhouse.
         It was mornings like these, when the trees cracked from the cold and the outhouse seat was ice, when there were 100 2x4s and 70 sheets of 3/4” ply and 25 sixty-pound roof rafters still to raise thirty feet off the ground, when the weather report was for yet another snowstorm over the weekend that would fill the second floor with yet another foot of snow, ice, eventually water...it was mornings like these that made me wonder why building a house had ever seemed like a good idea...for a minute...for a second...for any time at all.


CHAPTER TWO

         Call it naiveté or foolish optimism. Call it impulsiveness, impetuousness, over-confidence, stupidity. Certainly it was a case of overreach. Possibly a form of mild dementia.
         Though at the time it did seem like a good idea.
         Let’s build a house. No, it was more like, let’s build a house. Because Art and I had been looking for over a year for a place to buy, preferably a fixer-upper since that was about all we could afford. And we wanted some land, a couple of acres if possible.
         And privacy. I, for one, wanted nothing to look at outside the windows in any direction except trees and sky. We were writers, readers. We didn’t want noise, distraction, smoke drifting in from the neighbor’s bar-b-cue. We both needed healing. Art, from an overactive thyroid that had made him sick for a year before it was correctly diagnosed. Me, from a seventeen-year-long marriage that had taken its toll in more ways than I knew and from a divorce that had gone inter-planetary in its absurdity.
         More than anything, I wanted a home for my kids. Five teenagers whose lives had come apart just when they most needed a strong core to float away from and bounce back to. But we’d gone and deconstructed the home they’d grown up in, my ex-husband and I, and it was almost a frenzy in me to give them a new one. A better one, I hoped. Though eventually I learned that replacement isn’t possible. But even if it had been, the way we were going about it was going to take far too long. Children don’t stay children, don’t wait around while you try and fix your mistakes.
         But back when the decision to buy land and build was made, I was in a place where there was nowhere to go but up. At least that’s what I thought. I was starting all over again. New partner. New state. New home. New me. Well...as new a me as me could get. And with all this to do, with all this to deal with...five teenagers whose lives had fractured right along with mine, no particular prospects for income, no help, nothing to fall back on, with Art sick...with all this we decided to build a house.
         A house. A kind of heavy-handed symbol you might say, and you might say right. Because the house and the life have come together in about the same fashion.          Almost two decades later, the house looks finished from the outside, but there are significant gaps. The interior finish work—closet and cabinet doors, trim work, finished floors—is still incomplete. And there were parts that were finished too hastily and needed (and in some cases still need) to be redone the right way.
         The place is certainly unique...which we like. But that uniqueness takes away much of the ease of standard application. And the 52 acre hilltop that ensures our privacy comes at the expense of a steep dirt road that constantly needs to be maintained,  eats front ends, gives non-4-wheel-drive visitors a hike they’re often not up to, and during particularly bad winters even reduces us to walking up and down a few times.
         But land we did get. And privacy. A view of nothing but trees, distant hills, and sky. There are resident hawks and owls, wild turkeys, fox, coyotes, a million mice, a zillion ticks. No bar-b-cue smoke, no noisy neighbors. And my kids got a home. A little late, but some of them might say it’s come in handy from time to time, even though their ideas of a desirable place to live have turned out to be very different from mine.
         Would we build another house? Never.
         Would we have done it in the first place if we’d known then what we know now? Of course. Because we wouldn’t have believed a word. Well…I take that back. I wouldn’t have believed a word. Art would have. And when I think back, maybe he had a pile of misgivings that he simply decided to keep to himself. Because my energy for the plan was so high, and he’s never quite been able to bring himself to stick pins in my ideas of what’s possible. I was entranced by possibilities back then. It was the sting of reality I was trying to escape.
         Would I exchange the experiences for others less hard, less overwhelming? Actually, no.
         Building a house is a little like running a marathon. It hurts like hell while you’re doing it, but once it’s finished and you see that you’ve survived, there’s a particularly satisfying sense of accomplishment and an undeniable elation that’s lasts a long long time.
         Of course, it’s always a good idea to train for a marathon, a good idea to examine the demands that will be put on you, assess your ability to meet those demands, assess the willingness of your spirit to stay the course. We just grabbed a number and started to run. Maybe we were afraid to ask the hard questions because we knew what the answers would be, or maybe the answers didn’t matter because everything we’d always counted on was already so out of focus.
         Or maybe the reasons we did it don’t really matter at all.
         Maybe it’s the experience that counts.
         In the beginning, we barely knew a 2x4 from a six-penny nail. Didn’t know about foundation footings or weight bearing walls or rafter tie-downs or vent stacks, hadn’t ever heard of a termite sill shield or a ridge board or a cripple stud. A joist? Isn’t that something knights on horses did? Sleepers, sonotubes, soffits, stringers. Thermal mass, toenailing, Tyvek. Up to that point, the closest I’d come to anything electric was plugging things into wall outlets, and if someone had told me I’d end up running five hundred feet of Romex, I wouldn’t have known what they were talking about. If they’d said I’d wire a hundred outlets, I’d have said, “Not on your life,” since I didn’t know a hot wire from a circuit breaker.
         But run Romex I did. And wire outlets, plumb, frame walls, build a chimney, run a backhoe and work cement. All of it was hard, very hard. And slow, very slow. Much of what was hardest will never be seen...a 2000 foot trench for the utilities that reminded us every day for three months how Sisyphus must have felt. And then there was the cement for the foundation that came much too close to blowing out our home-made forms. There were people who thought we were amazing, and let us know that. And people who thought we were crazy out of our minds, and let us know that, too. And of course there were a thousand thousand hand-driven nails that hold the house together. We hope.
         For a very long time I experienced an actual spurt of joy every time I came up the driveway and saw a house where nothing used to be. To this day I appreciate every flip of an electric switch, the hot water that comes out of the shower head, the roof that doesn’t leak, the chimney that has a perfect updraft, the sun that pours in the windows and gives us passive solar heat on winter days.
         And the woods, the sky, the privacy, the quiet. These I like best of all.