Clearing out the driveway for Shane’s truck and trailer later tonight.

And yes, to those party to the backstory, that’s Ryan in the foreground.

When we were first considering this move, he strongly objected, worried that he’d lose the momentum and independence from the job he’d just landed a month before and, at 17, would find little to nothing to do for work or anything else in a town of less than 1,000 in rural northern Maine.

Because he was planning to go to college in Santa Fe this fall, he asked to stay with a friend in Alamosa from April through the first part of summer until we rolled back through Colorado in July for two weeks. After some thought, I agreed to let him do that.

I took a whole lot of flack for that decision, like a lot of the decisions I make, from a whole lot of people who thought it wildly inappropriate to let a 17 year old live for all intents and purposes on his own with us so far away. And it wasn’t that I felt it was a particular fantastic option, but if Ryan was going to come here to Maine with us he himself had to buy into it for it to work. He had just finished high school and really needed to start making some of those decisions for himself, and to see and deal with the consequences and challenges of those on his own.

I had a feeling after he saw what it was like to be fully responsible for himself, for his own rent, food, internet, all on minimum wage, and getting back and forth to work across town without relying on us for rides (and so on), he’d change his mind. I also had to accept the risk that he might not, and that something could happen and I might be sorry down the road for letting him do it with us so far away. All things considered I still felt like letting him find his own way was the right choice.

Two days after Sarah and I arrived here, after he’d been living with his friend and supporting himself for a full week, Ryan called and asked if it was too late to come to Maine. He arrived here on the bus three days later.

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My Uncle Lee (left) and my dad (right) on the porch outside the house we now live in - taken more than 50 years ago.

Shane and his mom and the dogs are passing the Kansas/Missouri border as I write this, planning to stop tonight somewhere between St. Louis and Indianapolis. We’re expecting them late Monday; I’m as settled now into the house as I’ll be until then.

It’s a story for sure, this whole move and how it unfolded. Every day I get more and more pieces of it from neighbors and friends and the house’s owner and from people who’ve lived in this town all their lives. When I first walked in, I felt like I’d gotten us in way over our heads. There was, there is, so much here that needs to be done and I don’t know where all that time and money will come from. But over the last few days those feelings have faded into affection, slowly replacing the concept of “work” with “love” when I start getting overwhelmed at the only half-finished list so far of everything this old house needs:

:: new front door
:: new bathroom door
:: washing machine hookups put back to laundry room
:: refinish all hardwood floors
:: remove or paint all paneling throughout house
:: remove kitchen wallpaper
:: replace two corners of kitchen ceiling
:: inspect and replace insulation and wiring
:: rebuild steps out back glass doors
:: fix roof leak and replace bathroom ceiling
:: replace all old carpets on stairs and in bedrooms
:: completely renovate and insulate front sunroom
:: completely rebuild front porch
:: completely rebuild back entryway
:: replace cracked panels in shower
:: replace or rebuild built-ins in breakfast area
:: untold work to do in cellar…

But we’re getting to know each other. My biggest anxiety right now comes not from the house itself but from the cost of heating oil here - $3.65 a gallon right now - with a 275 gallon tank that lasts roughly one dead-of-winter month, or about six weeks in the months on either side of that. Ouch.

Shane and I are brainstorming the greening of this place for that and other reasons, but those things won’t happen in time to help us through this cool and wet Maine spring. Luckily with the wood stove lit almost all day and night, I’ve been able to keep the heat at 60-62 most of the time and still be mostly comfortable.

One more reason why a sunny day here is extra welcome.

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We. Are. Here.

It took us a week, and some heavy-duty questions about whether I’d made the right decision for us with this house, but we’re in it. We have no furniture yet, save for some old, dated pieces the owners kindly left behind for us until Shane arrives with the trailer Sunday evening, and there is much work to do, should we decide we’ll be here long enough. But the smokin’ DSL works and the house is warm.

I sat and caught up on email and reading and various things over iced coffee and chocolate chip cookies by the wood stove. That’s all I’ll ask of tonight.

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The cold wind is wicked, barreling in from the east and scooping inches off the ten-foot drifts on its way by to whip into kamikaze whirlwinds around the roads and windows, mimicking another blinding, groaning snowstorm in a northern Maine winter that’s already broken record after record. At the post office today Rose, whom I’ve known since I was younger than Sarah and ran into unexpectedly there, said it’s the worst she’s seen since 1954.

We picked up new, hardcore wool gloves and have been lining our boots, taken by surprise (though I don’t know why, I grew up in it) at the thick wetness of it and its ability to penetrate everything we own.

But Sarah and I and the cats are warm and dry in the small, studio apartment we’ve rented across the road from my grandmother’s place while we wait for the farmhouse to be ready early next week. I’m nervous, the house needs more TLC than it had sounded by phone, and while I normally wouldn’t blink at the idea of a project house, I can only give personal elbow grease to so many things at a time. Were it not that it was once in my family for a very long time, I might have walked away and looked elsewhere.

Tomorrow if the roads are clear – they were all impassable out of the village today – we need to make a trip into the Big City to buy a new phone charger and wiper blades, both of which busted in the last 24 hours. And by Big City I mean a town the size of Alamosa about 40 miles from here, which is, without exaggeration, a full ten times larger than this place.

All my memories of the drive to northern Maine are summer memories; my parents rarely dared to travel here in winter. So this landscape was new, and the soft, ghostly purples and ivories, filtered greens and grays of the deciduous hills interspersed with evergreen as we drove up Wednesday afternoon in light snow were soothing and rhythmic in their transitions. A welcome contrast to mine.

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