Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [98]
I ordered Macouns and McIntosh as my first apple varieties. They are good for eating, cooking and pressing for cider. The tiny trees, four-foot whips actually, came in early May from a nursery in Pennsylvania. They arrived in a cardboard box at the inn. Paul and I planted and watered them, and they have since thrived and put out new leaves and shoots. There was the one incident involving a hungry moose who took a liking to the green tips of the young trees on his way down to the pond, but he has since found his meals elsewhere and the trees have recovered. I’m pricing out a fence. I’m dreaming of that day when we put the ladders against the trees and fill baskets and barrels with apples. I will send them to friends, bake apple pies, sell them at the roadside and fill jugs of cider for distribution to my neighbors. Maybe I will learn to make applejack.
A cabin is an unending source of pleasant labor. I put down a little grass around its perimeter, which needs to be mowed every couple of weeks. There’s painting indoors that remains undone, and I would like to build a bookcase in the bedroom. The barn is still a pile of beams stacked near the cabin’s porch. I think I will carry it around in my head for another season or two to extract all the pleasure of anticipation before I turn it into the reality of work. I’m also thinking I could use a small sauna, and I’m wondering what it takes to build a cider press. I also have in mind a set of raised beds for a vegetable garden, and I would like to have a patch of raspberry vines. I’ve begun reading about the varieties. They bear fruit from summer to fall, and some, especially the yellow varieties, bear fruit continuously from June through September. I have a good sunny spot in mind for them. I have also been reading about honeybees. I like honey in my tea, and all those bees would help with pollination in the orchard and raspberry patch.
Then there’s the cabin’s furniture. I’m adding to it slowly, from junk shops and the classifieds. I found a leather chair and ottoman for $150, which I dickered down to $125 and picked up at a swank condo on the Boston waterfront. It is a dark chocolate color and the ottoman is reddish brown. They make a handsome combination. My big find was a leather sofa. I had wanted a leather sofa for the cabin from the start—something comfortable and rugged and long enough to stretch out on for a night’s sleep. I found one at a good price ($400) but it was on the third floor of a row house in Boston’s North End, a famously dense neighborhood of narrow streets. It was too big to come down the stairs; it required a window exit from the third floor. I showed up with four long ropes and straps that tightened on ratchet wheels. The owner and I lashed two ropes around the sofa and took a turn around a beam inside the row house; then I lashed a third line to one end of the sofa and stationed a boy on the street to pull it away from the building as it came down to the sidewalk. A crowd gathered. The sofa descended slowly with all of us handling our ropes. There were no broken windows, rope burns or torn leather. I also found an inexpensive brass bed, and Paul donated a mattress and bedding.
As for the boys, Kevin is back to work. It’s a job with a company that cleans and refurbishes boilers in generating plants. The work is hard but he makes good money. He’s often on the road. Paulie is helping Andrew in his thriving boat engine repair business as he looks for a job as a motorcycle mechanic. Paul is now