One day in the 1960s Harry Frohock started work on an apartment for him and his wife, Ethel. Moving in with their daughter, Vonnie and her family certainly wasn’t a radical idea or even “sensible with lots of plusses”. It was just what people did when they got old.

The farmhouse at the top of Sleepy Hollow that Vonnie and Nat Stone bought in 1960 had been empty for a few years, ever since Frances Claytor left it behind as she aged. Harry had his eye on the porch chamber, the open loft over the ell that led directly into the top of the barn. Harry Collemore, Frances Claytor’s grandson, told Wally he remembered sleeping out there in the summer.

Every house and barn in Lincolnville with a connecting ell had a porch chamber; the children who grew up in them, who slept in them, talked about the icicles that formed on each nail where it poked through the roof. Imagine those nights.

So Harry Frohock went to work, enlarging the small door under the eaves that led to the open space, and adding a bathroom just inside it, the first in the house, making the two-holer out in the barn obsolete. He framed in two rooms, covering the studs with Homasote a cellulose-based wall-covering, similar to papier mache. He built in a sink and counter in the larger room, intending it as their kitchen. Ralphie, Ethel and Harry’s young grandson, picked out a pink-flowered porcelain light fixture that he thought his grandmother would like.

Harry installed five small windows in the low wall under the eaves, half sashes probably salvaged from old double-hung windows; they tipped out to let in air. A door in the second room opened into the main barn loft; a ladder led down to the first floor.

The old couple never did move in. There was some disagreement between the two families; Vonnie alluded to it when we bought the house in 1970. The middle room of the former porch chamber was her favorite, she told me, the warmest room in the house, all the heat from the downstairs stoves concentrating in that one little room. She liked to read up there on winter days, she said.

Going through the house with us must have been bittersweet for her. When we asked why there was a kitchen sink in the back bedroom she told us about the apartment that never was, pointed out the pink porcelain light fixture. Her son, Ralph Bullock, had been killed just a few years before in a lumber truck roll-over at the age of 14.

She and Nat had been trying to sell the place for a couple of years, and in fact, on the day of the closing, they took us out for dinner (double lobster special at the Beach Inn – today’s Chez Michel – $5.95) and told us they were getting divorced.

Vonnie loved the house and planned to live there “till they carry me out”, but life intervened as it usually does, and at the age of 58 or so, she still had several more chapters left in hers.

The 26-year-old wife, who remembers exploring her new home, is now a 73-year-old widow. As one son said to me recently, “you get to write the next chapter.” And of course, I do. Your life will unfold whether you write it or someone else does.  So the decision to divide the house, to share it with middle son Ed, along with D-I-L Tracee, Maggie, Andy, and Jack, is how I choose to write it.

Construction, or more precisely, demolition has begun. Harry’s apartment is now stripped back to its studs, gutted, empty, a clean slate, all the old wiring exposed, the broken Homasote filling up the dumpster out front.

Every single thing – hundreds of books, file drawers full of paper, uncounted items of clothing, tools for all occasions, the earlier-mentioned 15 fishing poles and 6 bags of golf clubs – is where it doesn’t belong. Some giant has picked up my house and shook it, then not so-gently placed it down. It’s worse than moving after 47 years because everything has to stay here, just not in the same place.

Actually, it’s not staying here. The lady at the dump and I are on friendly terms: “more random junk” I say as I drive up in my truck and tell her what’s metal, what goes to the mixed paper (my favorite bin), what’s destined for the Swap Shop, and the rest, well, two bucks gets me to the commercial dumpster. I heave boxfuls of mementoes, books that were once treasured, tax records, you name it, but always carefully saving back the boxes to bring in the next load. I go nearly every day.

This morning I write from my new room in the old house, though it will always be Wally’s room to the boys, but now my room to me, the original main room when this place was built in 1872. The plaster and lath walls are uneven, bumpy from many repairs, while the plaster ceiling, which must have sagged, was long ago replaced, lowering it to the tops of the door frames.

Sanding the wide pine boards for the second time in my 47 years here has given the room new life. Varnishing those bare boards is satisfying, a pleasure really, seeing the rich reds and golds bloom as the urethane soaks in with each slow and deliberate brush stroke. I smile a lot as I work my way across the floor.

I’m not sure why I’m so intent on this one room, carefully planning its spare furnishings, a small computer desk, a secretary with glass doors, a Murphy bed in the future. Only enough to be utilitarian, yet extravagant enough that I’m having our old gooseneck rocker reupholstered with pretty, pale fabric.

Could it be because this is the room where the two people I loved most drew their last breaths and departed this world? My dad, fifteen years after he first laid eyes on the house at the top of the Hollow, at midnight, with a soft March snowfall nearly obliterating it. My husband following some thirty-two years later on a cold January night, surrounded, as they say, by his loving family, none of whom had yet drawn breath the night of that March snowfall. Except for me.

Harry and Ethel’s apartment stripped naked, is nearly back to the porch chamber. It will bloom, this time as a small bedroom for a nine-year-old girl and a kitchen for a busy family. The door to the barn loft will be gone, a wide entry into a living room that seems as if it will stretch forever, windows at the front peak, and a big window at the back, overlooking Wally’s favorite view, the treeline.

Fall activities are already in full swing at Lincolnville Central School, and that includes Chess Club, Soccer, and Cross Country. Chess is big at LCS thanks to Bruce Haffner, our school’s enthusiastic volunteer chess teacher who starts with kindergartners; last year the LCS K-3 team won the Maine State Chess Championship! Bruce meets with chess students Mondays, 3-4 p.m. as well as Tuesday and Thursday mornings, 7-8:20 a.m.

 The Lynx soccer team started off with a win over Nobleboro. Monday they travel to Vinalhaven for a game; you can watch them play Appleton on Wednesday, September 20 at LCS, 3:45 p.m.

 Cross Country has a boys and a girls team. At the first meet at CHRHS the boys’ team placed third, and the girls placed first. Their next meet is Saturday, September 23 at Islesboro.

 The Lincolnville Community Library book group invites everyone to join them in discussing “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles this Tuesday, September 19 at 6 p.m. The bestselling novel tells the intriguing story of a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. The Tuesday discussion is also a great opportunity for anyone to come share ideas for other good books to read. 

Every Sunday for the past ten years Corelyn Senn has taken our dog out into the woods on her weekly explorations. That is, she’s taken two of our dogs, first Sammy, and then after he was killed in the road in front of our house, she began taking Fritz.

Fritz was a puppy in 2012, the fall we moved the schoolhouse across the road in the Center. I have photos of him at the festivities that day, a small version of the handsome white Golden Retriever he’d grow into.

Corelyn was patient with this not-Sammy dog, a pup with his own personality. With Sammy she’d roamed all over Lincolnville’s woods, places that probably only hunters have visited in decades. They discovered cellar holes, then searched for the well that would be close by; they found rock dams on streams, then looked for the mill site that was the reason for the dam.

Fritz has always been a bit more timid than his predecessor, more cautious, which given how Sammy died, running headlong into the road into the side of the school bus as it passed by, is a good thing. But since Corelyn herself isn’t exactly timid, she and Sammy had a natural affinity for the adventure of climbing around old stone structures deep in the woods, for getting lost as dusk was falling.

Yesterday Corelyn took me along on her hike with Fritz. She wanted me to see some of the places she’s been studying. And study is exactly what she does. We started at a place in Northport that she’d heard about, a large cellar hole with a tunnel leading away from it. That one involved clambering up a steep, rocky embankment, though it was just a few feet from a paved road. It was some eight feet deep with straight, rock walls, and huge granite sills. She’d naturally climbed into it and even ventured into the tunnel the first time she found it, wondering all the while if she could get herself out again. (It was a great relief to Wally and I when her daughter gave her a cell phone a couple of years ago, as up until then she and whichever dog she had were on their own. More than once we thought we’d have to launch a search and rescue mission as it got darker and darker out and no Corelyn.)

Next we drove over to North Cobbtown Road where, over these past ten years, she’s discovered the remains of the 19th century community that thrived there. Using the 1859 map of Lincolnville she’s identified the inhabitants of a couple of dozen cellar holes, then follows the trail of ownership of the property at the Registry of Deeds in Belfast. With census records and and other sources she figures out how people were related – a son built near his parents, for instance.

She’s been studying mills too. If you’ve ever come across a dam, or rather, the remains of a dam, on one of Lincolnville’s many streams, you may wonder at its purpose – so much work went into hauling those huge rocks and cut granite blocks. Corelyn took me down an old road, now maintained as a snowmobile trail, to what she told me were the remains of a mill on Kendall Brook that she said was built in 1831; I wouldn’t have realized what it was from the little that was left.  But from there we bushwacked upstream to see the two dams that had stored the water from the spring freshet. Now the mill site made sense.

Three hours later we, along with a very muddy Fritz, came out of the woods, walking up the road that Abigail and Lois, two Drinkwater sisters who lived in the neighborhood in the 1830s, would have taken to visit their older sister, Mary, at her house near the mill. Corelyn likes to imagine that.