There’s a certain kind of book to be found while browsing through a section in stacks at the Rumford Library. It’s a nonfiction genre, depicting a kind of life in toto, but if the genre has a name…. Let this be an attempt to describe it, and then a name will emerge from the description.

I’ve chosen three examples. The first is Louise Dickinson Rich’s book, We Took to the Woods written in the early 1940s. It recounts Mrs. Rich’s experiences of living geographically cut off from the outside world in the Richardson Lakes Region of Western Maine. The second example is Annette Jackson’s My Life in the Maine Woods: A Game Warden’s Wife in the Allagash Country, published in 1954. Bernice Richmond’s Our Island Lighthouse, published in 1947 and depicting her summer life on a tiny island in Frenchman’s Bay, will serve as the third example.

When Allen was unemployed last summer, he hankered for a shortwave radio. It would engage his mind and fill his time while he looked for work. From salvage on his previous job he had some old radio tubes and was able to trade them for a vacuum tube Halicrafters receiver in mint condition. He set it under the eaves on a low table, made from a shutter someone had given us, across from my desk. Night after night I heard the strange squealings and squawkings, the rapid da dits; voices and languages invisibly thronging the air from over the vast worldscape. Otherwise, in the starry night out my window, I had thought the mighty culture of human beings asleep in the dark.

“On first moving to Maine and seeing a line of tall ledges from a nearby road, I was enchanted, surprised. I’d never seen anything like them before: Mountains like waves of rock waiting to crash over the land. Not long ago, on snowshoes, we broke trail in a field below. In three feet of snow, exhausting ourselves, driven by winds laden with chill factors below zero. Oh that cup of coffee on our return!”

winter prep from a few years back 

This a.m., almost first thing, we cleaned the stove pipe. Even though it’s a soap stone stove with catalytic combustor, the ash and creosote accrete and need brushing out once a year. R. stands on the roof with long handled brush, I’m in the house beside the stove hugging the plastic bag around the stovepipe — a precaution against Ashy House syndrome.   I hear the big wire brush descending, like a mysterious hidden apparition, scraping scraping, it comes closer. The pipe is moving now, grating, grating.  Bigger and bigger its noise in my ear.  Huge.  I’m hugging, hugging.  Then, slowly the abrading withdraws.

Every five years he replaces the combuster. We heat the house with this woodstove and locally cut firewood. Maintenance can be frustrating work and every step along the way something might go wrong.

Ash dust goes up the pipe-draft as R. works.

Winter’s coming.  It’s worth it.

Pictures are from this week’s work.

I think the skunk is gone, but take no chances. At night outside I use a flashlight, going over to where Allen smokes. Don’t want to trip over skunks. 

Three nights ago was coolish, a typical fall evening. We would sleep with windows open, crickets trilling pleasantly. Late; got up to get some milk. Discovered the trilling coming from under the refrigerator and the countertop in the kitchen. It suddenly ceased being pleasant. I muttered as I crawled back in next to Allen. 

When I was a child, living on the edge of town, I thought briefly that the chirring came from stars. White stars vibrated in summer’s black sky and made this tinnitus of the creation earth. I have no memory of wondering why stars stayed silent in winter, but perhaps I simply forgot it then. Anyway, the trilling was part and parcel of our sweet season. Faintly, then vibrantly, then again faintly, magical. 

East Bethel Road