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A cabin gets built in three steps. There is the placement of the footing on which the cabin rests; there is the assembly of the simple box that is the cabin itself, and this includes the top of the box that is the roof; and finally there is the collection of final decisions and touches about the interior space that make the cabin habitable. The size and position of doors and windows fit in the second step but influence much of the third. The first step teaches all of the figurative truths associated with sure foundations and good beginnings. “Well begun is half done.” This is one of many builders’ homilies that apply to an awful lot of life in general. “Measure twice, cut once” is another. The real action of the cabin is the box: it defines the space and consumes most of the builder’s effort and materials and displays his skill. A well-built cabin is an aesthetic as well as practical statement, and, on the high end, it is a manifesto of craft and simplicity. It blends function and beauty in the way of a Shaker chair, an Indian sweetgrass basket or even a Stillson plumber’s wrench. The beauty derives from elegance of function. There is nothing extra, nothing fake. The final step of building moves the cabin from habitable to comfortable and even pleasing to the soul. So there is a hierarchy of sorts, from boots-in-the-mud foundation work to the Zen of sitting in front of a window that is exactly the right height and position to show the fall of the land toward a distant prospect on which the satisfied builder’s attention is focused. Maybe this prospect is a gnomish hemlock tree silhouetted against the gray November sky, allowing the builder in repose to dissolve into the landscape and achieve his yogic samadhi.

Paul and I had been through this before—right down to the search for a mutually tolerable midpoint between my absorption in the history of vernacular New England carpentry and his intention to get the goddamned thing built.

Thirty years earlier, when we were in our twenties, we had built a house together, my first (and only) house as a married man. It was a simple, honest, mostly square and plumb cape with a redbrick chimney down the center. It had four bedrooms, one and a half baths, a big kitchen, dining room, living room and full basement. It was shingled with Canadian white cedar, four inches of each overlapping shingle showing to the weather. The shingle spacing gave it the lateral lines of a Maine planked dory without the upward sweep. It was stained silver-gray, like a weathered beach cottage, with Cabot bleaching oil. Wide pine boards formed the floors. The door and window trim were white, and it had a twelve-inch overhang on the eave and one-over-one pitch on the roof, which meant that the roof rose one vertical foot for each foot of horizontal span. In other words, the roof was steep. It was a handsome and modest house at the end of a long driveway, and with the exception of a designer window near the peak of one side wall, it looked like it had been built two hundred years ago. It sat on fifteen acres in a small farming community northwest of Portland. I had insisted on timber framing that one too, in the old and traditional way. It was as if I were doing fieldwork for a dissertation in colonial architecture and Paul was building a house for his brother.

The story of the lumber that Paul and I were sorting in his backyard on that day in September nested inside the story of that first house, and if nothing else, the one story giving birth to the other showed that I hadn’t fully left my old life behind. There was something encouraging for me in the realization of the connection. If there’s one thing that I had yearned for in my life, it was coherence. I just didn’t seem to have the talent for it. I felt like I had been stringing together a series of isolated episodes, punctuated by failures, with one episode seeming to bear no relation to the next. This, I think, had been a source of the drizzly moods that sometimes descended on me. It’s difficult