Darned if I Know

A couple years back, we built the little red-doored structure you can see in the photo above. It was the first stand-alone building constructed from lumber milled on the sawmill that belonged to our dear friend Jim, who died in his sleep almost exactly three years ago. Man. Time’s a sneaky little bugger, ain’t it?

The mill was gift from Jim’s wife, Nancy, and it’d be difficult to exaggerate just how much it has contributed to our little holding. In addition to the red-doored cabin, the mill has produced lumber for the loafing shed immediately behind it, for our woodshed, and for innumerable other small projects. Just this spring, I’ve built a chicken coop and reframed the rotting end walls of our first greenhouse with lumber straight off the mill. Given that we’re still working our way through an ample pile of salvaged roofing (I dread the day when that particular well runs dry), I estimate the total cost of all these projects to be no more than $100 for the two F’s – fasteners and fuel – essential to building with home milled lumber.

Anyhow. That cabin was originally intended as “milking parlor” to replace our current cedar-pole-stanchion-in-the-corner-of-the-hay-barn arrangement. If it sounds a little funky, I suppose it is, although it’s served is quite well for a decade worth of milking. But it has its share of demerits, primarily relating to the combination of seasonal drainage issues and the dirt floor. It’s really only an issue for a couple weeks of every year, but it was enough to provoke us into considering an alternative arrangement.

Funny thing is, not a single milking animal has stepped foot in that cabin in the two-and-a-half years since we built it. That’s because not long after we’d started construction, I received an email from a young fellow I’d met when I was doing a talk over at Colby College in Maine. This fellow was named Dan and he’d just graduated and like a lot of college graduates he was struggling a bit to figure out what comes next. Would we be interested in a few weeks of free labor in exchange for room and board? We replied that we would, so long as the as-yet-unfinished (and uninsulated and unplumbed and unelectrified and pretty much uneverything) cabin would suffice.

Dan showed up in early September and stuck around for six weeks, until he came to his senses and realized no one was paying him wake up in a below-freezing shack (rechristened the “Dan Cave”) with nothing but another day of hard labor under Penny’s steely gaze to look forward to. Nate was the next sucker to inhabit the Dan Cave (rechristened again as the “Nate Crate”), though he at least had the good sense to arrive in June, right in the cozy bosom of summer. Like his predecessor, he lasted until things got well and truly nippy before decamping.

Our arrangement with Nate was looser. There was no quid pro quo; he wasn’t expected to work a particular number of hours in exchange for the sort-of shelter of the Nate Crate. Instead, he “paid” in the daily attention he gave the boys, as they gathered around the ‘Crate while he went about his crafts. Sometimes he joined us for meals; sometimes he did not. Mostly, he went about his life and we went about ours, though the longer he stayed, the more frequently his life and our lives intersected.

If you’ve read this space for any length of time, you know of my fondness for sameness and the small daily rituals that sameness engenders. Moving the cows. Reading time. Kindling the morning fires. But I also love the strange, unanticipated detours of life. How a milking parlor becomes a Dan Cave and then a Nate Crate , and how people you didn’t even know existed can come into your life. And not just come into your life, but become part of your life, because both Dan and Nate have remained in the area and we see them regularly. They have become good friends, not just to Penny and me, but also to Fin and Rye. Maybe especially to Fin and Rye.

Who knows why things transpired this way. Maybe it was all just happenstance. Probably it was. I’m not a big believer in the idea that some all-knowing fellow (or fellowess) is pulling the strings of my fate. I can just hear it now: “I’ll have the Hewitts build what they think is going to be a milking parlor and then I’ll have Dan email them and then I’ll send Nate their way and they’ll all enrich one another’s lives and that’ll teach ‘em all a thing or two. Hahahha.” 

Nah. That’s not how I think things work. What I think is that things happen when you don’t exclude them from happening. As wrote a while back, I’m pretty sure that the first rule of serendipity is being open to serendipity. Being willing to deviate from the script we all write for ourselves, even when that script is comforting in its familiarity.

The funny thing is, we’ve come to realize that the Dan Cave/Nate Crate never would’ve made a very good milking parlor in the first place. So what’s it going to be next? Darned if I know.