Gorilla Gardeners

I wanna call Dad, he says to me in a high pitch, after I turn on the tiny solar light, in the corner, near the east window, right where it’s been for the past 20 years. He and Whitney are waiting at the front door until I turn it on. He’s not afraid, he’s full of wonder. He’s amazed, just what I wanted.

At first he protested when I said that I was yanking him from school and going Downeast to Maine, to visit my dear friends Donna, Gerri and Pete. This is the place that I learned how to dig my own well, to butcher a deer, to tan a hide, to can food, to cure garlic for seed, to smoke meat. It’s where I learned how to eat a partridge just killed by a car, how to crack a lobster with just your hands, how to say goodbye to a friend dying of melanoma cancer, just a year and nine months after meeting him. It was a place that was grounding.

Right now, my ten year-old, who just 18 hours ago was in tears at the thought of not having wi-fi for three days, is dragging out skins of cured skunks and Australian possums. Donna’s house is phantasmal. What’s this one, Mom? I think it’s a mink. For those of you who don’t know, Whitney was an apprentice here in 2008, and is probably my closest friend. She’s amazing in her own right, but that’s another blog…

Kyle likes to describe Donna as ornery. She’s done everything, seen everything, and she truly could do anything else. She’s buried a husband and her best friend, she knows how to shear sheep, rake blueberries, preserve any food you can think of, make the best homemade wine you could drink, tan any animal’s hide, make friends with Feds and foes, she’s truly an idol. Right now, she’s working on a collaboration with University of Maine Press to catalog all of the plants on Acadia National Park.

The first night we arrived there, Gerri and Donna had gone to dinner at Oscar’s, a local lobsterman and friend, where I later bought 21 pounds of lobster to freeze at $4 a pound. That they’re gone, and we’re alone in the house gives me just enough time to show Whit and Bradford around. I show them my favorite things: the hand-dug root cellar, right down to granite; the reading lamp made out of sheep’s legs, the sepia picture of Bradford Kausen, whom our son is named after, looking contentedly out onto the water. Whit and my Bradford are rewardingly awed and amazed. This house has been completely constructed by this woman, her husband and her friend’s hands. She is not dependant on anything more than community, friendship and loyalty.

Mom, I wanna come back here with Dad to clean up the Little House. It’s where I lived for nearly two years, helping Brad die, helping Donna, learn to live, with Pete and Gerri and a slew of others. My son gets it. The magic of this place, the necessity of self reliance and close community. What a tonic in this bleak, dormant season of resting.