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By Root 452 0

floor. I had bought pine boards, ten inches wide, from Lovell Lumber. They were square edged and straight and fit nicely together side by side. When a gap appeared between two boards, we bent the next board tightly into place, using a crowbar as a lever. We drilled shallow holes at the positions where we set the screws to secure the pine boards to the subfloor. This allowed us to countersink the screws, which eventually I would plug with oak pegs. It would be a handsome floor once it was finished. Already, its smooth buttermilk surface transformed the cabin, making it into an almost finished living space. It invited a walk around in just socks. And that is just what I did—I walked around in my wool socks, feeling it underfoot, and then I skated around on the smooth planed surface. I placed a camera on an empty box at the far end of the cabin, turned on the automatic shutter and kneeled on one knee next to Paul at the other end to record our achievement.

The month closed with reds and yellows on the hillside. It had been almost exactly a year earlier that we made our first failed attempt at the foundation. Now the completion of the cabin was within sight.

CHAPTER 8

RESPONSIBILITIES

In the twenty-two years that I was married and living in Maine, from 1974 to 1996, I built a house, a career and a professional reputation. I had moved from being the most junior reporter at the newspaper in Portland to its editor in chief. My life in those years had been a steady professional ascent. I was not famous, but I became a substantial person in my field. I worked hard, stayed late and went into the office on weekends. I was invited onto the boards of community organizations and asked to make speeches. I took my family on vacations to Florida, put my children through private schools and owned a sailboat. I bought my wife a piano and my daughter a horse, and I took my son fishing in Canada. I made an identity as a husband, father and editor. Eventually, it all came undone.

In 1995, the year before I left Maine for Philadelphia and separated from my wife, I would drop by my mother’s apartment two or three times a week in the evenings after work. She looked forward to my visits and made dinners for me. I would sit and watch television or read a magazine while she cooked, and then she 217 would serve me, and we would eat together and talk. I was fortunate then to be earning enough money, as editor of the newspaper, to pay her rent and help her in other small ways. After our dinners, I took her for short walks in the neighborhood to keep her moving and mobile. She held my arm and shuffled along.

By then, I was deeply lonely in my marriage, and these evenings with her provided me with some relief from the silence and tension at home. I said a little about the situation to her, but never fully divulged the scope of my despair. She listened. Things would work out, she told me. Things always happen for a reason, she said. It had been her life’s philosophy: Que será, será—what will be, will be. In these, the final years of her life, I think she was worried about me, as she always had been, but she also was content in her own life. She had her two sons and her grandchildren nearby, a nice apartment, a small circle of friends at church, and she was retired. It was no longer necessary, after fifty years as a beautician, for her to stand on her feet all day long to cut, wash and color people’s hair.

My decision to move to Philadelphia shook her. She never asked me not to move, but I saw the flinch when I made the announcement to her. Even in my forties, I was still her good boy. She knew that my moving meant I would not be coming by for dinners or evening walks and she would see me only occasionally, maybe a few times a year.

She was seventy-three years old then, and it may have been only a coincidence that her decline became more rapid with my departure. She needed a lot of attention. The swelling in her legs grew severe, and her breathing was labored even when she moved short distances. She developed a severe hernia, and because of