Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [93]
We asked more questions, talked between ourselves, wept, called the doctor back into the room and gave consent to withdraw care. We must have signed papers, but I can’t recall. We were with my mother when her death came later that day. Her breathing slowed over the course of several minutes, and then it stopped. A respectful nurse turned off the monitor over her bed. Paul made the funeral arrangements. His two daughters went to the funeral home and fixed her hair and applied her makeup. The church was full. My daughter sang “Amazing Grace.” I gave the eulogy.
CHAPTER 9
THANKSGIVING
It was a good acorn crop that year. They began falling from the red oaks around the cabin in October. On some days, there was the steady sound of them hitting the ground. Thunk, thunk. Pause. Thunk. The acorn of the red oak contains more tannin than that of the white oak, sharpening the bitter taste, but still a good crop of nuts from these oaks was a blessing for the deer and grouse and even my little friend Pericles. I hoped he was okay. I had not seen him in weeks. Each acorn would have been an armful for him. He would be well provisioned for winter under the rocks by the porch that Billy was sure was an Indian burial mound.
Toward the end of October, Paul and I set a goal for ourselves. We wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at the cabin. Actually, it was Paul who suggested it. The thought of it had crossed my mind, but I figured it was too ambitious for me to ask of him. But with the mention of it coming first from him, I agreed it would be an awfully good thing and said we should try to make it happen. Paul was famous in the family for preparing big Thanksgiving dinners. He combined traditional dishes with some of our mother’s favorite concoctions—stuffed grape leaves, lasagna, spanakopita and her signature cranberry relish made with walnuts and oranges and a freight-car-load of sugar.
We still had a lot of work to do inside the cabin, some cosmetic, some essential. The interior window trim needed completion and painting. The plumbing was still not hooked up, and in fact we still didn’t have water to the cabin. There was not yet a woodstove for heat or even a stovepipe through the roof. The nights and some of the days were cool now, even cold, and heat would be necessary if we were going to bring people for dinner. The wall between the kitchen and the bathroom was still bare studs. We had to put up Sheetrock to make them separate rooms. There was also the matter of the electrical wiring. The cabin would not be connected to the power line down at the road, so I needed to bring electricity from the outdoor generator (also not yet in place) to the cabin and the well pump in the ground for running water. Paul had the name of an electrician who could help us with the wiring. We would do the grunt work of pulling wire through the studs and outdoor conduit, and the electrician would handle the panel and the connections to the devices.
To get all of this work done, we had to step up the pace. We were speeding along one day, working overhead filling in some of the blank spaces in the ceiling boards, when Paul smacked his thumbnail hard with the hammer. It immediately turned purple and throbbed as the blood from the bruise pushed up the nail. He applied pressure on it to slow the pooling of the blood, but the pain was bad enough to make working difficult. He kept going, but I could see he was having trouble. So I proposed a solution I had learned on a construction job and had once used on myself: piercing the thumbnail to relieve the pressure. It would hurt a bit at first, I told him, but it would then feel immediately better. He agreed. I sterilized a tiny drill bit with the flame of a butane lighter and went to work in my operating room—the front seat of his truck. Slowly and carefully, I turned a tiny drill bit, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, back and forth with my thumb and forefinger over Paul’s thumbnail