The shambles

It's sad to see summer ending. Our seasonal residents are draining the water systems, putting up the shutters, buttoning down the boathouse, preparing to face again whatever brutal realities they may have sought to escape in the mountains. But as long as the roof stays on and the crick don't rise, they can at least stop worrying about the summer place until next spring. Not so, the twelve-month resident. North Country houses disintegrate with the unceasing predictability of trans-uranic isotopes. A furnace has a half-life of ten years; after twenty it can hardly heat a cup of coffee. The leeches have been at the leach field, ice has chewed the shingles, mice worry away at the wires, and the water tap drips... drips... drips... It's enough to put me in mind of Yeats: "things fall apart, the center cannot hold," or the New Testament, the shortest verse of which reads: "Jesus wept."

Still, I couldn't abide a new-built house, unless I was fool enough and rich enough to design my own. A yard needs at least one tree grown tall enough to have been killed by lightning, just to keep the woodpeckers off the clapboards. A real home requires the sweat and folly of generations. It grows by slow accretion, like a termite mound. It acquires an essential patina of baby barf and dog hair, burnt bacon and tracked-in road salt. And all it asks in return is constant attention and every penny you can scrape together for the rest of your natural life.