Little House in Linneus

            Dad glanced at the house photo I had shown him. “Where is that place?” he asked with as much interest as a lobster has in a pot of hot water.

            “Aroostook County,” I replied. “A hundred miles north of Bangor.”

            “Oh, you don’t want to live up there.” Dad shooed away an invisible blackfly. “Every winter would be like the Blizzard of ’78.” 

But I was sure I did want to live up there. They say Aroostook County is the way Maine used to be, a place where folks wave to you whether they know you or not. Some call it God’s country; that sounded good to me. What better place to live than that?

            So after a few visits, we found a little house in Linneus. I told Mom and Dad the new address, leaving out the part that it had once been called Poverty Road. They had enough misgivings about our income potential as it was.

That winter even I had some misgivings. We had driven 400 miles north to drop off some of our furniture and to check on things, since we couldn’t move until spring. When we pulled up to where the house was supposed to be, all we saw was a mountain of snow towering over our truck. So, a bit bewildered, we scrambled up the snowplow pile, then trudged to the house.

Next we contemplated how 20 below zero really feels. We got the woodstove going and soon forgot about the cold, because it started raining in the living room. Later we learned about ice damming, but at the time I supposed the house we had just bought needed a new roof we couldn’t afford.  

By moving day, though, I was thinking more optimistically, partly to counteract Mom and Dad’s doubts. But they smilingly waved good-bye, even though what they really wanted to say was, “You are out of your minds! Don’t go there; this is stupid.”

            Moving day had been in May, so Dad conceded that there might not be any blizzards for at least a month, maybe two. And we really did have good weather, until October; one day we got a foot of snow. I recalled Dad’s dire prediction then, but I still doubted the winter would be all that bad.   

And it wasn’t—not that year, anyway. Nor was the job scene as bleak as they had supposed, at least not to our way of thinking. My husband worked at a potato farm, then got a job making fence-post caps at a mill. Later he built sheds. We scraped by, but the County had benefits worth more than money.

For instance, we had fresh vegetables from our garden and fruit from a few apple trees in the yard. We made applesauce—apparently the chunky kind, since we didn’t own a mill. But it was good. So was the well water; it was ice-cold, even in July.  

Even Mom and Dad admitted that they liked the water. They drove up now and then to visit—in the warm months, of course. And although they would rather have seen shopping malls and restaurants instead of potato fields and evergreens, they were at least relieved that the house we had bought wasn’t nearly as dilapidated as they had figured.

We had running water, after all, except when the pipes froze. And the mice usually stayed in the attic, at least during the day. The back bedroom did get drafty, but that was a good thing in the summer months. One time a neighbor who had helped build the place confessed that, “Mistakes were made.”

Yet it was our house, mistakes and all. And it was in a little town where you can still pay a small amount of money for a huge amount of food, that even Dad marveled at. Where you can order deep-fried pickles, red hot dogs with a side of homemade fries, and whoopie pies for dessert, while feeling good about it—at least when Mom’s not in town. That’s the way Maine used to be, the way it still is in the County. What better place to live than that?