Maria Was Right

Maria was warm, engaging She beamed sunshine and welcome We chose several things. Then she pointed out the wave.

I said, “No ”

She said, “Let me have Adriana try it on You’ll see ”

Maria clasped the necklace for Adriana. The piece glowed. Adriana glowed. They were beautiful together The curls the swirls, the light and dark, the shadow and light played across the surface I couldn’t resist We ordered two dozen Sold them all in a few weeks We now have more

Buy the necklace It’s the prettiest of the three pieces because of the way it plays with light when you move

The promise: wear the necklace and you’ll get a dozen compliments the first evening out. The even bigger promise for all your dinner dates for years to come: 100s, then 1000s of comments, compliments and who doesn’t like a compliment of my own capabilities (never mind that the savings are largely owing to Jimmy’s superb work and generous rates). So it’s with this inflated sense intact that we begin developing the spring.

....

Ah, the spring. When I first discovered the spring, emerging from the base of a ledge outcropping in the woods above the house site, I’d envisioned something simple and even quaint in form and function: a box of cedar boards, perhaps. Or maybe I’d fashion a box of fieldstone. I could see it in my mind’s eye: the cool water against the cool stone, gray on gray, pure as the source, developed thanks to a woodhandled shovel, the muscles in my back, and the sweat on my brow.

As with many aspects of building a home, however (and particularly those pertaining to water and waste), the State of Vermont has its own opinions about our spring, and thus we’re compelled to install something infinitely more complex and invasive. There will be no cedar boards or fieldstone, and unless I want to dig for six or seven months straight, there will be no woodhandled shovel. So I call Jimmy and we get to work.

In truth, it’s not that bad, although the day we lay 800 feet of water line between spring and house is one of those days that’s amusing only in hindsight. It’s August now but atypically cold, and raining not just cats and dogs but ferocious lions and saber-toothed wolves. The trench is nearly 5 feet deep and 18 inches wide, and although I endeavor to remain above grade, there’s no way to avoid clambering in and out of the trough, a maneuver that necessitates full-body contact with the freshly dug, waterlogged soil. I soon find myself shivering intermittently.

To his enduring credit, Jimmy jumps down from the dry, heated cab of his machine to help muscle the roll of pipe into place. By the end of the day, the water line is unfurled, and the two of us are a grim sight, frigid and shriveled and caked in muck. The only thing to do is to joke that someone some - where is paying top dollar for an exfoliating mudbath treatment that looks and feels much the same. Heck, when you look at it that way, we’re getting a bargain.

Not long ago, I was talking to one of my magazine editors on the phone. He lives in New York City, and he expressed surprise that we were building our own place. “I didn’t think any- one did that anymore” is what he said. I thought about it for a minute and realized that I couldn’t think of anyone we know who hasn’t built his own house, isn’t currently building his own house, or doesn’t plan to someday build his own house.

In truth, this claim is a modest exaggeration—of course we know people who haven’t built and have no plans to build their own houses—but it’s not really that far off the mark. In rural northern Vermont, building your own house—or its infinitely more fraught cousin, restoring an old farmhouse—is just what you do, at least among the sort of riffraff we hang with. Partly, it has to do with simple economics: The most expensive aspect of building is generally the labor. But I’ve come to believe that in many cases, it’s owing to an entrenched ethos of thrift and pragmatism. In other words, perhaps some of these people could afford to hire people to do it, but there’s a deep-seated force compelling them to pick up the hammer and do it themselves.

I certainly don’t think that everyone should build their own houses, if only because I have a lot of friends in the building trades and I’d hate to see them out of work. But I’ve come to believe that everyone should have at least some idea of how to build a house, even if it’s only to understand the basic fundamentals of it all: how to square up a wall, frame a window opening, set a rafter, use a circular saw. Two weeks of good instruction and they’d be set.

It seems to me as though somewhere along the way we decided that our children didn’t actually need to learn the skills that are most essential to their physical well-being. The author Daniel Quinn makes the point that from even the most revered institutions of higher learning in this nation, we graduate human beings who are in a sense helpless. They can no sooner put a roof over their heads than transplant a heart; no sooner grow a carrot or slaughter a hog than fly to Mars; no sooner doctor a flesh wound or make their own medicine than dive to the bottom of the ocean. Of course, the erosion of these skills becomes self-perpetuating, as each generation husbands fewer of them than the previous one: We are less skilled than our parents, and our children will be less skilled than we are.

That’s another of the things I think about between to-do lists during the early sleepless-but-still-trying minutes of each morning in the summer of 2015. When that gets to be too heavy, I sometimes think about the old farmhouse I pass each morning on the way to our new land: a sagging porch along the front, and on it, a cushioned chair and an old chest freezer with two chainsaws atop its lid; across the road, a small herd of cows, Jerseys mostly, heads bent to the ground in search of food. I think about how on a few recent mornings, I’ve spotted a woman sitting in the cushioned chair, reading a book.

Then I think about hitting the gravel road. I’ll roll down the truck window, hear the ping of small stones against the rocker panels, breathe deeply of the midsummer air.

And then, once in a while, if I’m really lucky, I’ll drift back to sleep.