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By Root 512 0

at the hillside to find twelve inches of new snow. It was light and fluffy, as if the heavens had dropped a load of dandelion puff on the deck and the beams. We didn’t need shovels, and it offered no resistance to our brooms; we could have almost blown it off the deck. We had sunshine and cold dry air when we worked in those days before the new year. It was an invigorating atmosphere: hard work, clean downy snow and icy air. Kevin lifted, climbed, sawed, drilled and always cleaned up when we were done—another characteristic of his father. He kept going when I had to rest. My body reminded me often that I was not twenty-four years old, as I had been when I had built the house. I felt stiff in my shoulders and the small of my back was sore. It wasn’t so easy to bend under a board or hoist myself onto the deck. I got in the habit of taking ibuprofen every morning before we got to the cabin.

We finished the basic frame, without the rafters, by the end of January. It was another proud moment in the cabin’s construction, but we were going to need help to get the rafters in place, and to truly have a completed frame. The rafters were big and heavy, and the work was overhead. It would be clumsy and even dangerous for two men. Fortunately, Paul was ready to rejoin the project.

If I were to make a list of lessons learned about cabin building, one of them would be: order your materials well in advance of when you need them and have them delivered in proximity to the building site.

The late construction of the driveway and the problems of the foundation holes had thrown me off, and I did not follow the advice I would have given to others. The floor-frame lumber had been delivered to the top of the drive before the heavy snow, but now we needed lumber to fill in between the big timbers of the walls and roof. It would have to be dropped at the bottom of the driveway, which was a good two hundred yards from the cabin, and the snow was falling regularly now, piling ever higher. It was well over the deck, by at least a foot.

With Paul back on the job, we began planning for a big day of work. We e-mailed between Boston and Portland. Paul was pushing me to make sure all the materials were at hand and to make my final decisions on the placement of the doors and windows and how I wanted to handle the framing of the roof. He did not want to begin the discussion at the job site. He wanted it settled so the work would fly when we were there.

“Do we have a game plan for Saturday?” he wrote to me. “I want to make sure we have everything lined up so we can make good use of the time.”

I assured him of the plan and explained the details right down to the number of pieces of lumber I had ordered for delivery before we would arrive. I called the lumberyard in nearby Oxford and ordered eighty-six two-by-fours and thirty sheets of plywood. The two-bys would frame the walls, and the sheathing would cover them. Paul suggested in a return e-mail that we frame the walls first for strength before installing the rafters overhead. He reminded me to add nails to the lumber order, which I did—two fifty-pound boxes, one of sixteen-penny common nails and another of eight-penny. “I’d have them also bring a bundle of shim shingles,” he wrote. “Those will allow us to frame all the exterior walls a standard height and shim to the horizontal bent just in case things aren’t level or square.” He told me that he was going to load the truck after he got home from work with tools, a generator, the staging and the window frames that were still in the backyard. He already had attached the trailer to bring a snowmobile up, and he was planning to build a sled in his garage that we could pull behind the snowmobile to get everything, including the lumber that had to be delivered at the bottom of the snowfilled drive, to the cabin site.

I had worked on a summer ditch-digging crew when I was in high school, and the foreman would say to us, “Okay, boys, I don’t want to see nothing but assholes and elbows.”

That foreman would have been blinded and pleased by the blur