I’m feeling nostalgic this morning, as the sounds of workmen pulling our 19th Century house into the 21st waft up from the cellar underneath me. They’re finishing up a two-week weatherization project that’s had them invading all the secret spaces of this old house: the attic, the cavernous space above the ell, into the slopes of the eaves and to the dingiest corners of our dirt-floored, rock-walled cellar.

“Your house won’t be the same”, Ham Niles, of Evergreen Home Performance, told me just before they started work. His cautionary words (or were they meant to be encouraging?) got me remembering how I listened to my house one day back in 1997:

         I thought I heard my house breathing this morning, a fleeting sensation of life from deep in the walls. I turned off the faucet at the sink where I was washing dishes and leaned in close to hear better. Only the water. "The water," I yelled to my husband upstairs. "The water's running somewhere." I waited to hear him say, "just the toilet" before resuming the dishes. Ten more minutes and the system would have drained dry.

        Sometimes the sounds from my house are more urgent; a crackling stove pipe escalates to the heart-stopping "whoooosh" of a chimney fire in seconds. With four woodstoves we spend two-thirds of the year on high alert, banging on pipes, endlessly fiddling with dampers and drafts. When the wind blows, the cellar door bangs or a loose bit of plastic flaps against the foundation. In the days BDP (Before Double Panes) our curtains fluttered whenever a breeze kicked up.

        We monitor smells as well. A too-hot stove announces itself from the other end of the house, while a sickly gas smell in the kitchen starts off as a mere whiff, only growing more insistent with every passing day, reminding me that the propane tank is nearly empty. Then, at least once a year, something dies somewhere in the walls. We endure weeks of decomposition, picturing the bloated, festering corpse of some unlucky rodent slowly, very slowly, drying up until it has no more substance than a fallen leaf.

        Our house has mini-climates, summer and winter, but they're more obvious when the woodstoves are going. The kitchen's a hotspot, except by the back door where you can still see daylight through the doorjamb. Back in the bad old days when our marriage was young, water would freeze if spilled on the floor there. The upstairs back bedroom, where in generations past children slept in summer when it was an open loft to the barn, feels like an overheated city apartment. Or at least it does when the downstairs stoves are cranked up. Any other time it's likely to give you a chill. More than one visitor has refused to stay there, citing rocking chairs that rock untouched, unexplained noises, vague (undefinable?) feelings of dread. Our middle son always ran by a certain cold spot in the hall, every hair on his arms standing straight up. I learned to ignore the flickering figure on the stairs, never seen straight on, a mote caught at the corner of my eye.

        We're a good team, my husband and I, riding herd on this old house of ours. From the March morning we set eyes on it nearly 30 years ago, about to be married within the month, we've been in love with it. "Oh, you don't want to look at that," said our realtor. "The floors are crooked and the walls cracked," neglecting to mention the rotten barn sills, the old roof, the leaky window frames. But it wouldn't have mattered. We did want to look at it.

        The rambling house and attached barn stands alone at the top of a curve in the rising road, ringed by large trees. That first morning the whole was frosted with a heavy spring snowfall that was already dropping with plop-plop-plopping sounds to the ground below. Chickadees darted and chirped at birdfeeders, the owners welcomed us inside warmly, and we were sold.

Today, twenty-seven years and three sons later, the house feels the same to us, though our neighbors have watched dormers sprout on the roof, sheds -- tool and wood -- appear in front, a sunroom across the ell. We feel we're the same too, when we look into each others' eyes, hear the familiar voice, feel the other's comforting touch, (though it's doubtful we look the same to our neighbors). Just as I listen for the crackle in the stovepipe I hear irritation underneath his words and know his allergies are acting up, or sense his anxiety over work. We finish each other's sentences, complete each other's thoughts. Waiting for me, he knows I'm almost home when I turn onto our road a mile away.

        For all the tightening up we've done, the caulking, insulating and banking, we still sit with afghans around us on a windy winter day. The roof will need to be done again soon, and there's no keeping paint on. Just so, no amount of analyzing moods, or practicing patience, or trying to be understanding has completely stopped the rip-roaring fights that still break out every once in a while. The old insecurities, the ones that were there BDP and even BH (Before House), crop up as predictably as that dead rodent. But we mostly navigate around them now, much as we find our way around this place even when the power fails, a skill to be equally valued by homeowners and lovers alike.

          Would I really want to go back to those earlier years? So much has changed. The seams in the bedrock that fed our well finally completely plugged up with the rust that plagued our water system; a new well a mere ten feet from the old one, along with a filtration system, now brings us decent water pressure. We replaced one woodstove with a Rinnai and its reliable, easy heat for our shop. Another, small Jotul that kept our back room warm has been retired as well, leaving us just two stoves to tend. And yes, double paned windows were a huge improvement over the old wood-with-wavy-glass ones that were original to the house. It’s been many, many years since spilled water froze on the kitchen floor or the curtains blew during a wintery blast. Still, with three heat sources – wood, oil and propane – our fuel consumption (and bills) are astronomical. Bad for our pocketbook and bad for the environment. 

         What got us started down this weatherization path was the free consultation Evergreen does to show you where all that heat is going. Although we’d had insulation blown into the attic spaces years ago, it wasn’t nearly enough, and the leaky places where heat could escape hadn’t been sealed at all. The thin, interior-type door between an ell bedroom and the open barn loft was one of the worst offenders. Even we knew our cellar was part of the problem. When this job is done, our top will be snug all around, and I’m very happy about that. And I’m coming around to being happy about the cellar, too, though slower, much slower.

         First, let me tell you about our cellar. Rock-walled, dirt floored, damp, home to more four-legged and eight-legged critters than I want to know about, it’s the primitive base of our home. Some two or three men, I imagine, staked out a 20 x 24 space not far from the rough road that led up from the Beach, in the middle of Hezekiah French’s newly-cleared pastureland, around 1870. With shovels and picks they dug down six feet, laid up rock walls all around, using the rocks they dug out, and ones they hauled in with an ox. Granite slabs cut from the quarry, possibly the one behind Randy Harvey’s house near Slab City, were maneuvered into place for sills. 

         It’s always been cool under our house, well, downright cold in the winter. And damp. It was a natural root cellar where potatoes and carrots and turnips could quietly winter over, only sprouting when spring started stirring outside. I never went down there without imagining it open to the sky, in some undefined time, way in the future, trees sprouting from the dirt floor, a genuine cellar hole like the ones dotting every corner of our town.

This Saturday, July 11, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. come to the Strawberry Festival and Parade. Children are invited to gather at the Lincolnville Library to have their bikes or wagons decorated for the parade which starts at 10 and proceeds through the Center to the Community Building grounds. Once again, there’ll be plenty of strawberry shortcake and pie, hot dogs, a white elephant table, book table, yarn and crafts table, free children’s crafts and games, music and a chance to catch up with friends and neighbors. At 11 a.m. the teachers of Spindlewood Waldorf Kindergarten will present a free puppet show with silk marionettes, “Snow White and Rose Red' , a classic tale for those 3 to 93 years of age.

Do you enjoy gardening? Weeding? Tending a flower garden? There are several beds, small, well-defined beds, at Lincolnville Beach just waiting to be adopted. Contact Lee Cronin, 236-0028, if you’d like to take one on!