My winter blanket came out over the weekend, and the summer one went into the wash, a simple move to be sure, but pretty significant: it’s getting cold! Windows that have been open since last June (isn’t that when it finally warmed up?) are firmly shut and locked. Still too early to bring the window inserts up from the cellar (those wonderful blockers of winter winds in a drafty old house), but getting close. Surely 2020 still has another spell of hot days up her sleeve.

But summer is certainly winding down. One by one our garden beds have been harvested. The beans are long gone, the garlic and onions pulled and hung up to dry, the plants in one tomato bed decimated by blight (after giving us baskets full of cherries and Paul Robesons) are gone, stuffed into grain sacks for the dump. Ditto the peas and dry beans, pulled and gone to weeds.

I’m currently on a mission to spread dressing on every single bed as its harvested. Dressing, of course, is a polite name for poop. I get mine from my neighbor’s horses. Krystal Coombs and I barter sock darning for daily buckets of poo. Back in the day, back that is when Wally and I were young and keeping a milk cow, a flock of hens, a couple of pigs, random geese and occasionally turkeys, as well as a long-lived pony, we had plenty of the stuff.

But that was years ago. For the past couple of decades there’ve only been the hens, and what we shovel out of their coop is half wood shavings, which break down too slowly to be much good for the soil. But not the stuff Krystal’s horses produce! You can actually heat a greenhouse with a base of horse manure, though I’ve never tried.

The other big chore in the fall, besides putting the garden to bed, is getting in the wood. Many, if not most of us, burn wood, either as our only heat, or to supplement some other source, or just for the pleasure of watching a cozy fire crackling in the woodstove or fireplace. Living in the middle of the woods as we do – check out Google maps satellite view of Lincolnville if you doubt this – having a cord or two of firewood on hand comes naturally.

We’ve always heated this house primarily with wood, though it’s been wood heat atop the consistent heat of an oil furnace toiling away in the cellar. But it’s a sprawling, drafty old place, even more so now that the second floor has been converted to what amounts to another house – three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, and cavernous living room. It’s home for a family of five: two busy adults and three, shall we say, boisterous children. The furnace keeps the pipes from freezing, heats our water, gets us through the freezing nights. The woodstoves (my two downstairs send plenty of heat upstairs) keep us warm in the rooms we live, cook, and eat in.

They burn up a lot of wood, those stoves. And this past weekend the upstairs family efficiently filled our new woodshed, all five, (or at least the two adults with a fair amount of arguing amongst the three children), moving last year’s dry wood and making new stacks of this year’s green wood. The woodshed is a little miracle in my narrow world, built by Tracee and her dad Allan Moeller, over three or four days these past weeks. Allan, recently retired, has been doing what he loves, working in his Dresden woods, sawing into lumber the pine and spruce he harvests. He’d about finished his wife’s she-shed and was ready to tackle our new woodshed.

The old, some 30-year-old edifice that sat smack in the middle of our dooryard, had seen better days. Tracee dismantled it a few months ago, nearly single-handedly, in a burst of her own newly-found freedom from the job she left in March. That’s another story, but involves coming home from her last day at work, the very day our world shut down, to find she had three kids to home-school. So come spring she was ready to tear something apart; our old shed fit that bill perfectly.

The summer weeks went by with no apparent progress on a new shed. All we really did was pick a new location, at the end of the house, well away from the kitchen door, a counterintuitive decision as it seemed. But with a sturdy wheeled cart and three mostly good-natured children willing to haul it filled with wood to the door, we had a plan. Tracee and I (mostly Tracee) put in four corner posts, and that was it for weeks. Finally, Allan and Cindy (my co-grandma of the three) arrived one morning, their pick-up loaded with newly-sawn boards and tools. The result, 10 feet wide and 14 feet deep, with a steep shed roof overhanging a spot for the cart and bags of kindling, is a neat combination of Allan’s boards, some of them with wavy edges, bark on, and the metal roof panels Don and I brought back from the Amish metal shop in Whitefield one afternoon. Who knew you could carry 14-foot-long panels in a pickup with a six-foot bed and make it home with everything intact?

Finishing off the whole thing are six colorful blocks spelling out O-B-R-I-E-N fastened over the front. That’s the result of an afternoon art project with Grandma Cindy, several bottles of paint and three remote learning kids out in the garden patio. Eventually the purple and magenta paint stains on the grass should disappear, right?

Wally was the wood stacker, as I frequently say, back in the day, when he cut and split four-foot logs, stacked it, and all winter, carried it in. There were the fifteen years or so when we had children old enough to bring it in yet young enough to still be living at home. Even so, between reminding, nagging, and cajoling those kids, he probably did most of it.

Honestly, it wasn’t until he died – at the end of January – that it hit me. What a lot of work it is to heat with wood! I’d always built and tended the fires, but using wood that somehow magically appeared in the brick wood box built into the kitchen. Now filling that box was up to me. Then, in the spring after Brad Bowen delivered the first three cords of the six I’d ordered, it hit me all over again. It was up to me to stack all that wood into the neat mounds Wally always made. By the next spring, my upstairs workforce had moved in.

I silently thank myself over and over for the brilliant idea of suggesting they live upstairs.

Winter, or rather the idea, the prospect of winter now brings with it a tiny frisson of fear, fear I never used to feel. One of my sons wrote, in a recent FB post, “Thanks [to you outta staters] for supporting us this summer, and we’ll allow a few of you back for some leaf peeping, but if you’re thinking of trying to winter-over... not everything Stephen King writes about is fiction... Leave the winter-rentals for the locals- it’s getting chilly in the campgrounds... “

And that’s the thing, that tiny quiver of fear, is magnified by what we imagine, no, what we know is coming. No more outdoor gatherings of friends, no more outdoor dining. Don and I decided we’d better get a lobster roll before it got too cold, or more specifically, split a Brass Compass lobster club sitting outside at a table along Rockland’s Main Street. We’d already waited too long for Rick McLaughlin’s fried clams; he closed a week ago. Even so, though the lunch was delicious, it was a bit chilly the day we went.

The teachers at Montessori pre-school are wearing a large button in class with a photo of their own smiling face, so the little ones see more than two eyes peering over a piece of cloth. Not a bad idea for all of us.

We’ve felt pretty safe from Covid here in Waldo County so far. Though as that August wedding in Millinocket proved, one thoughtless gathering can sprinkle the virus all over our state. But people need other people. The prospect of sitting in our houses ­– day after day, perhaps alone, perhaps with a spouse, no events on our calendars, perhaps working remotely, maybe with the anxiety of sending kids to school, our attempted smiles hidden behind masks – is daunting. We lived through last spring that way, but that was with the hope of summer coming. Now winter looms.

Town

Tonight, Monday the 21st, the Selectmen meet for the first time since long-time board member Dave Barrows died tragically in a tractor accident a week ago. This is a big loss for a small board of five, meeting together as they do every couple of weeks for years. One of their first duties will be to set a date for a special Town Meeting to elect a new member.

Another issue coming up on the agenda will be the Beach Schoolhouse. Rosey Gerry and I will be coming with a proposal that the Historical Society acquire the building

This will be a Zoom meeting; join using this link. 

Sewer District Underway

If you’ve traveled through the Beach these past couple of weeks you’ve no doubt noticed all the cranes and other equipment just south of Ferry Road. Mostly invisible from the road is the construction of the new sewer treatment plant. Bright pink painted dashes on the road indicate where the pipes will go, buried underground. To get a look at the extent of the project go down Ferry Road toward the ferry parking lot to see what’s going on.