Maine Metaphor: Experience in the Western Mountains. S. Dorman

is drawing blackflies. They don’t seem to bother her, so I mention my facility at feeding them. We rise and go inside where Henrietta, showing glad of my presence, offers me some houseplants. Harley is forever starting them so she has many African violets, cacti, rubber plants, aloe vera, and a few crown-of-thorns. The latter piques my interest. I’ve never seen one before. My own supply of houseplants is limited to one variety—one plant exactly.

      I follow her from room to room, collecting plants. Henrietta moves slowly, stiffly: she has arthritis and is getting over flu. Rooms are dim, dark green shades partly drawn; I make out the accumulation of years. The tiny sitting room, with its TV, has two comfortable old chairs packed together. A cluttered small room, furnished for comfort. Cozy but private. As though two lives, two only, were deeply imprinted here. The comfort of it is for these two alone.

      We talk, walking from room to room looking for likely giveaway plants. We come across a windowsill feeder thick with shelled sunflower seeds, just outside the bathroom Harley built—a fresh place, bright, with a breeze blowing in from the valley below this height on which they live.

      Would I like a bird feeder?

      We’ve returned to the kitchen where she points out the window to various feeders in foliage across the lane. “Got one I don’t like, hanging in the shed.”

      “Thank you, I have a feeder, gift from my son.” But something tentative in my tone, perhaps, nudges her on. I follow to the shed, the attached catchall room found in these old connected dwellings unique to New England and the Connecticut Western Reserve in Ohio. I laugh on seeing the feeder, identical to the one I already possess.

      How to care for the plants. She points outside to the rain barrel, claiming that the sky’s “acid water” is what they like best. She takes me outside to inspect Harley’s “system.” Simplicity itself, the barrel sits below the angle of two abutting metal roofs. Water pours off the juncture down into the barrel. Around the side of the house, two washtubs catch more runoff. The soil for houseplants comes from the composted garden. “I don’t pay money for dirt.” She grins like a girl.

      Then she offers me coffee. We return to the old ell kitchen, sit at the table. I’m surrounded by cooking appliances: a 27-year-old electric stove, immaculate; a huge old woodburning range; an eight-year-old microwave sits between two porch-facing windows. She drops a teaspoon of instant coffee into a cup of cold water and puts it in the microwave! Something I’ve never owned whether from philosophic, aesthetic, or financial reservations—I haven’t decided. But it seems to fit perfectly with these old Mainers, who are far more practical and acquisitive than I’ll ever be.

      When our coffee is before us the men return. Allen says Harley has taken them almost to New Hampshire to meet his quarry. But the man has his hands full in Mass., and is not about to move his venture. Harley’s scatter-shot method has missed its mark but provides the table with laughter.

      We sit around it over coffee, talking about chicken digestion. Gravel in the chicken’s craw contributes to its egg manufacture. Harley says he feeds his chickens broken plates. Henrietta is bored. She’s leafing through her Modern Maturity. I glance out the window: a shining green blip, with buzzing wings, stops in the form of a hummingbird, sipping from the plastic feeder. It zips away again.

      Harley is going to give me a tour of the garden and chicken house. We cross the lane first to see his hens. Entering through gloom, I spy a brown egg in a trough. With tender pride, Harley points out the speckled bantam hen. The little thing sits in a corner box on fertilized eggs Harley bought after he discovered his rooster didn’t have what it takes. He picks up the egg and we go out into the sunlight.

      What’s he going to do now he’s retired? A slight movement of his head tells me it’s not a term he likes. When thinking of retirement, one of my background and generation thinks pensions, of money coming from some corporate plan. We think of gold watches.

      Things are different here. There are no pensions for woodsmen, no pensions for wood mill workers. A retiree gets a gold watch only if other workers chip in and buy it for him.

      Harley is 62 years old. He’s got sparse brown hair, threaded with silver. His nose is long, and there’s a deep cleft in it between his brown eyes. When he wants to look at the fine print, he sets a pair of outsized glasses on his nose. Harley’s chin is stumbled with dark whiskers. Dark work clothes cover a barrel chest and short legs. The tip of his right index finger, with which he frequently gestures, is missing.