31.12.69
So, on a day of eager September sunshine in 2008, after having bought a arrangement of land in western Maine, I stood in a corner of my fellow-clansman Paul’s suburban backyard in Portland, and examined a be as good as of lumber I had dropped there more than 10 years earlier. I had to stomp down the weeds with my vastness-ten brown-leather brogues to get to it. I hadn’t yet bought a yoke of work boots. I was dressed for the classroom where I now earned my living, disguised as a college professor: khaki trousers, button-down cotton shirt and semi-sonorous tortoise-shell glasses. I confronted the wood; or maybe, as a symbolic artifact of an earlier soul, it confronted me. It was a temporary standoff with the past. Piled breast high, the wood made an incongruous sight among the neighborhood’s turquoise swimming pools, over-sized gas grills and slumping badminton nets. It resembled nothing so much as a lashings of old railroad ties dumped by the side of the road.
I brushed the unshaped surface of the wood with my hand and pressed a concise into its pulpy flesh. It was spongy: not a good ensign. A few of the boards showed sawdust and smooth channels that were the profession of carpenter ants. There were many more pieces — dismal posts, big square beams and long silvery rafters with bird’s-opening mortises — that had come through the years of sun and snow mostly solid. I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy with the wood: a little weathered but still mostly intact. This was what I had hoped for on the demand up from Boston, where I lived and worked. I had counted on salvaging enough encumber from the pile to form the frame of the cabin that already had taken express in my mind.
Source: WBUR