Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [76]
Spring passed from the hillside. For a week the pine pollen had been so profuse in the air that it left a green skin over the pond’s surface. Lilac blossoms had filled the town’s dooryards and cemeteries. The nighttime frosts were over. Irises followed the lilacs—wonderfully elegant and purple on their stems, they appeared along the roadsides, in ditches and at the granite foundations of the oldest houses.
We were in the embrace of summer. I spotted a doe in one of the hay fields along the Adams Road. She was as russet as a berry on the bush, and I guessed she was watching over a fawn that she had dropped in the unmowed timothy, hidden from the foxes and coyotes. Fawns are without scent—one of nature’s blessings and safeguards. The best part of the day for me was early in the morning when the wood thrushes filled the hillside with their liquid flutelike song. It was as if the pure eight-syllable melody—tut tup, o-lay-o-lay-o-lee—were being blown through a water whistle, or had bubbled up from some natural spring. The song was both so pure and so deep—with the notes sounded simultaneously and in a haunting harmony—that it seemed to give dimension to the hillside, defining its boundaries and occupying its hollows. The songs filled the spaces among the trees and rocks as if with colored light, and the final high notes lingered in the cool dappled shade of the oaks and beeches. It was for me the distillate of a woodland summer morning, and it never failed to bring me pleasure.
Even on those days when Paul, Kevin or Billy was unavailable and I worked alone, I was not entirely without company. I was joined by a chipmunk that liked to hop onto the surplus beams we had stacked in front of the cabin, in among the trees. The stack was about four feet high, which seemed to suit my friend. He would climb and sit, working his tail, watch me work for a minute or two, then run off to a pile of rocks in the woods, where I presumed he had a burrow. He was not much bigger than a man’s fist, with two white and brown–bordered stripes on his back and shiny black eyes that glowed like tiny spots of wet paint. He was never still, twitching his tail and looking right and left.
For me, a chipmunk was an unusual sight in the Maine woods. I had found red squirrels to be far more common. I accounted for the difference by the abundance of oaks and beeches around the cabin. Red squirrels are pine seed eaters, while chipmunks are more likely to eat nuts. Red squirrels are also noisy scolds and aggressively territorial, and they often make me want to do nothing so much as fire a shot and collect their tails for tying trout flies. Not so chipmunks. This chipmunk seemed to be evaluating my progress with a critical eye. I named him Pericles after the builder of ancient Athens, who I suspect did more supervising than building. Occasionally I’d set out a few peanuts for him. He was oddly selective, taking some and leaving others. We grew used to each other, and he would come close to the deck for a look when some important piece of work was under way. Sometimes when I could not see him, I could hear him (or one of his neighbors, or his Aspasia) issuing a hollow chuck-chuck sound framed by sharp clicks. It resounded in the woods like a drummer striking a tomtom followed by a rim shot. On some afternoons, it seemed like the entire percussion section of an orchestra was warming up around the cabin.
The road I traveled to the cabin each morning took me past the place where the old Adams homestead had stood. It would be hard to imagine a more pleasant setting for a home. There was a gentle swelling of the land, a rising up like a wave at sea, except this