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By Root 490 0

and correcting his errors. “That’s not how you pull a nail,” Paul said. Paul showed him—he laid the hammer flat and rolled the nail out. Kevin disputed some of the advice, but Paul’s experience and authority overruled Kevin’s objections. Kevin’s temper was beginning to rise. I saw that a quiet father-and-son drama was playing out: Kevin wanted to impress his father with his work, and even more deeply to have the work he was doing demonstrate that he had turned a corner in his life; Paul, for his part, was playing the skeptic, making it clear that one day’s work was not sufficient evidence of a new path. At the right moment, I caught Kevin’s eye, winked and smiled. I let him know that I was aware of his plight, and that my advice was to let it go. Russell also had picked up on the friction between the two of them and pushed back a bit on Paul by suggesting, with humor, that Paul’s cuts could be more accurate.

“Hey, Paul, what are you drinking over there? This stud’s a full half inch short,” he said.

I had planned to place windows in all of the cabin’s walls except for the one wall in the ell that faced the porch. The biggest windows, a full four feet by five feet with the eight-over-eight panes, would go in the front wall of the ell and the back wall of the main living area of the cabin. They would give maximum views to the outdoors. Then I spread tall but narrower windows in all the other walls with the exception of the short right-side wall, where we had left in the one midwall beam, the mistake we had discovered that had us rethink the carpenter’s original design. That wall got two smaller windows, on the high side of the beam. I also planned to put windows near the peak on the gable ends of the cabin.

It was astonishing to see the difference that the stud walls with framed-in windows made to the appearance of the rising cabin. It was filling in and looking like shelter. I walked the deck, evaluated the space that would be enclosed by each room and counted the steps from room to room. It was ten steps from the room I’d designated as my writing room to where the door would eventually open from the kitchen to the porch. It was fourteen steps from end to end of the cabin. This was fun. The hammers pounded. At around four p.m., the sun made its descent behind the hemlock trees on the knoll at the rear of the cabin. Kevin and Russell had commitments, so we packed up for the day. I drove back to Portland with Kevin, and Paul and Russell left in Paul’s truck, hauling the snowmobiles. Later Paul and I picked up some dinner in Portland and went to bed early.

I woke at six a.m. on Sunday, still full of the good feeling of the previous day’s achievement. I slipped out of Paul’s house just as it was getting light and drove back to the cabin. There was a thin layer of new snow. I brushed it from the deck and picked up board ends and nails that we had left during the previous day’s work. I stood in front of each roughed-out window opening and assessed the view. From the big window closest to where the woodstove would sit, I saw the rising knoll and its hemlocks behind the cabin. This would be the window that would catch the setting sun in winter. From the window of the room where I planned to put my desk, in the right rear of the cabin, I looked out on the big red pines and the slope toward the distant ridgeline. We had not framed in the ell, but I speculated anyway on the views through the big windows that I had planned for its front wall—an oblique line down the hillside through the oaks and maples to the crease where the small brook was now bubbling under the snowpack. The bathroom would have two windows: a view from the toilet to the ledge out back, and from the tub to a collection of small pines, a place where I often saw chipmunks darting in warmer months. They would provide good entertainment during a long soak. I walked to the space on the deck, to the front right, where I would put the kitchen. Its windows would pick up shards of light from the pond below, now just a snow pasture with the tops of reeds showing through the