Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [94]
We installed the trim around the inside of the windows. I had picked a bright red paint for the trim to give the place a cheerful look. The paint store called it tomato red. To me, it looked more like cream of tomato red. This was another controversial decision. Kevin did not approve. “You’re going gay, Uncle Louie.” He favored a dark green, and I saw that Paul was in silent agreement with him. Green was the standard move—the traditional choice. I held firm to the red. A little touch of the fanciful couldn’t hurt, and in the dead of winter, when the days were cold and short, it might do a world of good to enter a cabin with some bright colors. Kevin came around, but then I took a step too far. I picked pumpkin as the color for the trim in the bathroom. To my team, the choice was incomprehensible. Pumpkin? Again, I held firm. Pumpkin was one of my two favorite pies. I would soak in the tub and meditate on pumpkin.
Near the end of October, I got some very good news. My son, Adam, was returning from Peru for a brief trip to the United States I would have his company for a few days. He would visit me, his mother in New Hampshire, and several parishes and college campuses in New England as part of his work for the church. He had entered a Catholic religious order based in Peru soon after college and had been in continuous formation and training since then. I had not seen him since the previous year when I had traveled to Lima and together we’d prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for his community of brothers and aspirants. I had missed his companionship these last few years. His absence had knocked a big hole in my life.
Adam had been my closest fishing partner when he was a boy, and since he had been away I had mostly lost the urge to take my fly rod down to the brooks. Fishing by myself held little interest for me. An awful lot of the enjoyment I had gotten from fishing during his boyhood, I had come to see, had derived from being able to introduce him to the wonders of the streams and woods as I knew them—how to read the water, how to identify insects and match them with our homemade trout flies, how to induce a fish to strike, how to release a fish so it survived. He had been a good student. Without him to take along, I didn’t feel the same excitement about getting out to the stream. Here’s another thing we learn as we get older: sharing a pleasure magnifies it.
After he had gone to Peru, Adam would write to me from time to time of mission trips to the Sierra highlands, and he included details of the streams, insects and fish. I replied with regular updates on the cabin. It was a treat for me now to have him home, even if he could not stay long enough to be with us at Thanksgiving. At the cabin, we painted window trim together, ate a big dinner at Melby’s and spent the night at the inn before returning to Boston the next day, but not before I had taken a moment to show him Great Brook, which, I told him, held some nice-sized wild trout. We agreed that one day we would fish it together. I hoped that day would come.
Paul and I gained ground, and Thanksgiving in the cabin seemed attainable. We built a platform for the generator, which Paul hauled up in his truck, and we slid it—all five or six hundred pounds of it—into place. Bam! On that day, in the second week of November, I saw the first skim of ice on the pond and ice crystals on the damp leaves. The maples were now bereft of all foliage. Responding to pressure from Paul, the electrician showed up the weekend before Thanksgiving, and so did Paul’s friend Steve, the plumber. There’s nothing like having a couple of competent men on the job who really know their trades. They worked along steadily, and soon we had both power and water. Russell came up another day with