The night a stranger called to tell me my son existed I’d been exhausted by a day spent demolishing the exterior wall of my kitchen with the help of my trusted pink crowbar. April blew her cool wind into the butchered room, sprinkling construction dust onto the cutting board where I’d gathered greens for supper. As I snacked, the raw spinach was course and ragged and beautiful, like the empty space where a wall once stood. My fridge and sink were poised to leap off the newly-jagged edge into a dumpster of debris and tetanus fifteen feet below, but me? I was fortified. The rough, gaping maw was progress.
Two years prior, I’d been lured north to this 1840s Greek Revival home by a sexy, swinging For Sale sign, and it was love at first sight. A grand but forgotten home steeped in past and potential? When can I move in? Life in the heart of a quiet Maine coastal village? Where do I sign? My optimism saw past the home’s sagging roof, botched plumbing, and misguided additions. Nothing Yankee craftsmanship can’t mend! The house’s scars made it sag with a kind of negligence I understood, a carryover from my early years, waiting for someone—anyone—to reach through my childhood and rescue me.
“I think you might be a good fit,” the caller said. “The boy needs a young, active family.”
The man on the phone distilled facts. Succinctly. Selectively:
“He’s five.
Living in Gardiner.
Really cute kid.
The parental rights in his case have just been terminated.
He’s legally free for adop—”
“Yes,” I interrupted, the word ‘no’ a foreigner to my tongue.
When I hung up the phone, fatigue slipped from my body, leaving my heartbeat fast and light and racing toward a new horizon. Across the room, a creak whined from the corner post of the kitchen, calling me to its bones like a child wooing a parent toward an unsettled ache. I pressed my palms to the now-exposed post that still wore the bark of a tree, an outer protective coat dried nearly weightless after two centuries, yet still rippling dark and wild as a current. This Eastern White Pine was once tall and resilient, descended from a towering species strong enough to serve as masts on early seafaring vessels, lend spark to the flame of the Revolutionary War and dub Maine the “Pine Tree State.” While alive, this tree would have cast seed to feed songbirds, gifted her foliage to sheltering deer, offered the delicacy of her bark to beaver and snow-shoe hare. She soothed and protected, cradled nests in her bows. Her death gave my home life, and she was sheltering still.
Before he could become my son, the child was a boy visiting our home. He introduced himself to his weekend bedroom, making a rug angel in the deep carpet, letting our dog Finn lap at his leaping giggles. He gathered eggs from our chickens, a satisfied smile blooming among his cinnamon freckles as he stroked the silken feathered back of Mable, my full, fat hen. With concentrated stewardship, the child carried two eggs to our broken kitchen, yet didn’t notice the makeshift wall, the randomly missing floorboards or our lack of counters as we piled sugar, flour, and eggs to the mini rolling island. He was terrible at measurements and spectacular at making a mess. Flour stained his cheeks and clothes as he ate chocolate chips, his body a mass of wiggles, always in motion, even as he stood still.
“Do you have powice?” he asked.
“Police?”
He nodded, his face a wreck of melted chocolate.
“There’s a station just down the road.”
“I want to bwing them cookies.” He licked his stubby fingers. “A powice obbicer saved me, you know.”
I didn’t. Though I must have.
Together, we walked to the station with a heavy plate of baked goods, where my small child rang a buzzer, waited and wiggled, then offered twelve cookies and seven words to a tree of a man: “Thank you for always keeping us safe.”
My son’s return a week later was easier, quicker, smoother. He bounded toward me; his eyes wide with wonder. My body swallowed his in a whole hug. I breathed in his crisp apple scent, his joy. He called me Respite Mom and moved through the house flanked by a dog at each side, his adventurous spirit pulling me from renovation work to hike the woods. On the trails, he faltered over the terrain, his feet unable to keep pace with his excitement. At the edge of the forest, on the ocean’s wave-slapped rocks, we indulged in a picnic lunch before following the wide, leaf-littered trail home where I wondered if it was the child’s eyesight or his coordination that made him stagger and nearly fall every fifth step. Or was it his footwear? Fatigue? His lack of agility spoke to something bigger than excitement, something I’d already begun to worry over.
Preparing for bedtime, I bathed him, dried and dressed him, then snuggled him into his bed that still wasn’t his forever bed. We read together: me tackling the words, him expanding on the illustrations as I learned the language of his slips, lisps, and mispronunciations.
“Can I say my pwayers?” he asked.
“Of course. Do you want to be alone, or should I join you?”
“I’m otay alone.” He scrambled out of bed and knelt at the side of the mattress, his freshly-soaped skin sweet and intoxicating.
“DEAR GOD!” he yelled, his hands clasped tight below his chin. “THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME A NICE RESPITE MOM AND A GOOD HOME TO SWEEP IN! I LOVE THE DOGS AND MABLE THE CHICKEN!”
He screamed loud enough for neighbors to press their interest our way.
“AND GOD? WATCH OVER YOU, TOO, BECAUSE YOU ARE REALLY NICE AND YOU HELP NICE PEOPLE!” He paused. “PLEASE DON’T LET ANY KIDS GET HURT TONIGHT, GOD. KIDS ARE NICE PEOPLE.”
On his third visit, my tandem kayak slipped effortlessly into the inky harbor at Christmas Cove, a nearly round naturally-formed inlet connecting a salty river to the Gulf of Maine. Here, the quiet of Easter gathered around the lobster boats tethered at their moorings, their dove-white hulls bobbing close and concentrated. Under their watchful gaze, I paddled while my son luxuriated in the front seat of the craft, his head raised to the diving cormorants and driving sun. He was an old man on the water, a quiet observer, his small arms crossed behind his neck, his paddle retired across his middle, his tongue stilled, his senses awed. The standing pines of a remote island welcomed us for lunch, their branches gathered just above the shoreline, their fine pine needles as intertwined as linked hands.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Honestly? I don’t know the name of the island.” I portaged the kayak over the beach of broken shells. “But the banks are fat with wild blueberries in the summer and you can eat them until your belly aches.”
“We should call it Bwoobewwy Island!” he said.
“That is a very good name.”
His eagerness sent him climbing the low island until he spotted a small, simple house in the near distance. Abandoned, and not.
“Can we go in?” he asked, his eyes wide.
“We can, but we need to be really careful, okay?”
“Otay, but why?”
“Well, someone owns that house, but they don’t live here anymore.”
He pulled in a breath built of curiosity and we walked past a narrow outhouse with a crude crescent moon carved into its weathered plank door. We slowed at the house and wiped our feet at the entrance to the small, galley kitchen—not butchered like mine, but a storyteller all the same. Crude wooden shelves stocked canned goods like library books, their labels faded to earthy pastels, the expiration dates disappeared to time.
“Are we going to cook?”
“Nope. Just explore around a bit, if that’s okay?”
“Yes, pwease!”
We bent to the living room, with its central fireplace, and knitted wool blanket folded over the back of a wood-rim couch, the stuffing in the arms repurposed by local critters. We moved quietly, slowly—honoring the space that still held the spirit of its last resident, her kindness inviting us in long after she was able.
“This is the first island I ever explored in Maine and it’s my favorite house in the whole wide world.”
“Whole ‘tire world? Let’s lib here!”
Indeed.
Together we were drawn to the roughhewn curio cabinet lined with brightly painted exotic figurines from Asia and India and beyond.
“Wow!” gasped my sweet boy, and I fed his wonder with an Ecuadorian doll offered from my palm to his, her body made of husks, her felt pink vest still vibrant.
“This came from very far away,” I told him.
He petted the corn husk doll with intention, with all the tenderness he showed Mable and Finn.
“This cabinet holds the most special items. I think this collection was very important to the woman who lived here.” I explained how the objects would have arrived by a large boat and then a series of smaller ones, even if he couldn’t know the magnitude of their travels, how long it took for them to reach this place, be assembled together, share this slip of time. “These items were chosen carefully,” I told him. “Like art and love.”
“Where is the lady now?”
“I don’t know.” I placed the doll back to the shelf, running my finger along the dust-free wood. “Let’s go upstairs and maybe you can solve the mystery.”
The dormered second floor was small and crammed with stacks of yellowed publications. The papers made of ink and trees and industry were all addressed to a woman I would never meet. I wondered if this attic on a forested island served as her place of repair. Or maybe her place to prepare—where she corralled her brilliant thoughts to the page before submitting pieces of her life to her editor for print within the thousands of magazines piled like pillars.
“These publications were delivered for years, see?” I pointed to the date next to the sepia-soaked Times announcing Hawaii as the fiftieth state, its ink and print crisp. “All of these papers arrived before 1962. Do you know how long ago that was?”
“When dinosaurs libed here?”
I laughed. “Before I was born, anyway.”
“You must reawwy like papers.”
“I like stories.”
The quick wrinkle of his nose told me he was unconvinced that any worthwhile tale could survive the trapped, stagnant air of the lonely room. But someone had left this island in 1962 when the papers stopped arriving, the food stopped being consumed. The owner moved on or passed on. Maine islands were famous for holding secrets, but this one curated memory.
“This house has been here alone for nearly sixty years and the people who visit take care of it. Each person doing a little. That kind of tenderness seems super rare and special to me.”
“It’s bwoo-tiful,” he said, leaving me unsure if he was talking about the house or a community that tenderly cared for a forgotten place, allowing it to age gracefully, undisturbed, as if its unbroken presence said something important about our collective humanity.
“Do you know places can tell a story, not just people?”
“I know! There are miwwion papers!”
“Yes!” I laughed, surprised by his ability to show me the world without pretense.
“I’m hungry.”
I gave a soft poke to his soft belly. “You’re always hungry.”
He giggled and we braved the steep, warped staircase downward while singing a pirate song from his favorite cartoon. He ventured into the back room with its glass walls and forever view of the sea. He was only a few feet in front of me as the sun beckoned us to the enclosed south-facing porch with its heat and light.
Beneath us, the floorboards of this tiny room creaked as we asked them to bear our weight and interest. We were greeted by the woman’s cast iron Singer sewing machine in the front corner, polished clean of dust, on display as a prized possession. I brushed my palm over the spine of this heavy behemoth of industry and self-reliance and thought of my nana, a woman who bore seven children to life, privately mourned the three she lost, and extended countless welcomes to the children she gathered from the church orphanage to her modest home for Sunday meals because there was always something to give to those who had less.
In the sunbaked room, I felt a small tug on the hem of my jacket.
“Um, Mom?” my child said.
The house inhaled then, the wind, too. Even the ocean stilled its swells while the trees dipped low because we’d all heard it. One word: Mom. Three letters joined to pass effortlessly from a child’s lips. Naming me. Renaming me.
“There’s a lady!” he whispered, and then I saw the sleeping woman, just as he raised his shaking finger to the metal bed in the far corner.
“Oh my god!” I startled, my arms snatching him to my middle, our raced heartbeats syncing as my brain registered the long gray hair spread across the propped pillow, a body turned on its side, the lumps and bumps of a person under blankets. But then. Something didn’t seem right. The length of the body was too short, the hair too perfect, too impossible. “I think…,” I said, daring a step forward, as I tucked him behind me. I poked at the feet and jumped back. Relieved to find the shape was made of jumbled blankets.
“It’s a trick.” I laughed, explained. “A prank.” My hands cupped his cherub face. “Oh my gosh that scared me.”
“That blew the bejezzus from me!”
“I KNOW! Me, too!” We both laughed then, our nerves finding escape.
We peeled down the blankets to investigate the network of pillows and trickery. When we were truly satisfied she was all fluff, he tucked the fake lady back inside her nest, pooling the blanket under her fake chin. He repaired this pillow woman as if tending to a live person. He worked slowly and with respect, showing me the age in his soul, how there was so much I could learn from him.
Under a canopy of guarding trees, we ate apple slice sandwiches, the word Mom pressing us together as it expanded me infinitely.
I met more of my son as he stayed for a week of school break. During these longer visits, he fell apart. Had quicker outbursts. Bigger tantrums. I held him, rocked him through his description of the thing that pushed him over the edge: an unresponsive button on his truck that stirred his anger, the way he’d smash a thing until it broke. Then, he’d cry. A terrible, feral cry because the small incident felt so big in his tiny heart.
“Don’t be mad at me,” he begged. “I’m sowwy. Don’t throw me away.”
“It’s just a toy. All I care about is you,” I told him. “If you’re okay then I’m okay, okay?”
“Otay,” he sobbed.
Most times he’d let me pull him from his rage, but I was never fully present. Because the truck didn’t just break; it broke because he got mad because his fingers couldn’t make the truck work the way it was supposed to work because his fingers—and his entire body—were confined to an animal crate and never got to develop and his beautiful heart was raw with anger for the people who would do that to him and even as much as he was beginning to love and trust me, he knew I wasn’t his people and that he was only with me because others let him down, and worse.
This child deserved far more than I could ever give him and I wondered if all moms felt this way. Like even our deepest reservoirs would never be enough.
I wondered if my inability to be enough, give enough, was why the state reversed its decision to place a five-year-old boy in our home. For weeks when I cried, terrible words scratched beneath my tears: “I’m sorry. I’m a bad mom. Don’t throw me away.”
Months later, I fed long boards through the window of my third-story attic to the driveway below via a crude pulley system I’d rigged to protect the forgotten wood. Their wide surfaces were rough on both sides, so unlike modern construction where neat rectangular boards are whittled into edges and precision in a way that makes it easy to forget lumber begins its life as a tree. The tools I used to restore the boards were old, too, worn soft at their handles and gifted to my husband from his grandfather, a man I knew only from the craftsmanship and kindness he left in his wake, and the freedom his bravery gifted all of us on the other side of Normandy. I had other tools, too. Invisible ones, nurtured in me by my father. Like grit and determination. The ability to do the hard thing in the face of hard things. My Irish nana joined me, too, waking my memory to the ritual of the Celts, how they planted a tree in the center of any new community.
My nana planted a Christian cross at the center of her new life in this country, but still remembered the pagan Crann Bethadh, her thick brogue forever knitting together music and myth in her storytelling. Her curled knuckles rapped at her chest when she spoke of this in- between world of her worship. “The Tree of Life,” she’d tell me in a way that made my own young fingers knock at my sternum, waking that knot in my chest. The heart. The giver of life.
For days I worked, pushing the sharpened blade of the wood planer across the boards’ surfaces in anger for the separation from my could-have-been son. I pushed with grief for the absence of any guarantee that we’d ever see each other again. I pushed for hope that I might be able to heal some deep loss in him, and me. I pushed until all my risk and pain and heartache was sharpened splinter thin, knife-like and embedded. I labored until I was exhausted, until I broke and cried. Still, my hands craved purpose. They returned to work, steadily sanding, polishing away the final layers of rough skin on the enduring wood, unearthing the meaty flesh underneath.
Exposing a surface that was clean and fresh. Like a newborn’s skin. A second chance.
From the local diner, I enlisted an old timer to show me how to join edges without using screws or nails, but by allowing the planks to link into each other, binding tightly to hospitable grooves. My mentor was a skilled craftsman, gray around his edges and bright inside, like the wood we worked. He was patient in the way of old people, and I was careful with his kindness.
When the tabletop was finished, it stretched eight feet long and nearly five feet wide. An anchor and meeting place. A tree at the center of my home. A Crann Bethadh of my own making. I attached farmhouse legs and painted them sturdy black. I sat directly across from the old timer and we admired the plain utility of the table, and the craftsmanship it took to make artful hard work appear effortless.
I poured us tea, blowing on the hot liquid more as a way to contemplate than cool. Even then, I was unsure how much I’d risk. But at that table, this man was family. “This table is for my son.”
He looked to my core, the life-giving place tucked under my heart. “Yer with child, are ya?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He turned his mug once in full rotation over the one dark knot in the table’s rich wood, the hardened portion of the tree that once grew perpendicular—against the grain—and got compressed for its efforts. “Yer lookin’ to have a child?”
“Not in the usual sense.” I held my story tight. A growing thing within me. “Mine will be a new home for him,” I said. Risked.
The old-timer met my eyes then, as if recognizing me.
“He was supposed to be here months ago, but the state....” I trailed off.
His hands gathered around the warmth of his cup. “How old?”
“Five. He’ll turn six next month.”
“Ayuh.” Stillness sat between us for a long time before he cleared his throat. “Rode the train when I was a boy ’a six.”
I raised my chin to welcome his story.
“Got scrubbed clean for that ride on the ole Boston & Maine.” His eyes settled to the window and the fertile green of the trees beyond. “Never had nicer clothes than those duds the church ladies gave me that day.” He let free a trapped laugh, light and buoyant as a promise.
“Sounds nice.”
“Seats were hard. Still remember that.” He shifted in my upholstered dining room chair, like the memory still poked sharply at his spine. “Us kids got on and off that train so many times in one day…thought I’d seen the whole world by the time I got to where I was goin’.”
“You have a big family?”
“No family at’all. Till I got to Danforth. Up near Canada. Got picked by a lady needin’ help with her hayin’. Took me and an older boy.” He rolled his lips inward, clucking a noise free from his back teeth. “That older fella didn’t last the night. Was off to the woods before the widow brought our blankets and suppah out to the hayloft. Suspect he’d seen enough not to trust.”
My fingers tightened around my mug. “You’re talking about orphan trains?”
“Didn’t call ’em that by my time. Still, it was folks trying to find homes for kids when a kid lucked outta getting’ a good one the first time ’round.” He smoothed his palms outward across the silk top of the table, his arms spreading wide as wings. “A boy deserves a good table.” Youth crept over his features then, erasing decades.
Sunlight streamed through the window, drawing up a glow from the golden wood and casting it under his chin, fresh as a buttercup. “Ayuh. Ya’ll be givin’ that child a fine table.”
A fine table. A cross. The Tree of Life. Trust. Risk.
So many words for the same center.
The old timer didn’t have words when I gifted him the remaining boards, enough to make a table of his own. He stared at the offering, silent appreciation softening his hardened shoulders.
Together, we loaded the gray wood planks into his tired pick-up before he heaved his slowing body inside the cab, steadying his gnarled hands at ten o’clock and two across the faded steering wheel, his knuckles milk white. He turned his head then, in that slow, deliberate way of elders who know moments matter. His reed green eyes locked on mine. “A boy deserves a good ma,” he told me. “Yer boy might not always realize he deserves good, so ya can’t ever go lettin’ him forget.”
“I’ll do my best,” I promised. Him. Me.
“Ayuh.” He slipped his antique truck into gear. “Thing is. Making a place for a boy in the middle of yer house. Well, that’s the kind a thing a good ma does.”
My hand went to my chest, that place so packed with emotion and gratitude and unexpected love for the man in my driveway, reminding me how the hollowed-out parts of us are the spaces where others find sanctuary. I watched his truck drive off and didn’t feel that kind of love swell in my core again until my son returned, all smile and youth and hope and joy.
My boy crashed into my legs with his hug. “I missed you!” he said.
I picked him up, joining our bodies as close as the two sides of one heartbeat. I smothered him with kisses and welcome. I wanted to bathe him in apologies. I wanted to tell him we’d never be apart again. I wanted to promise him every tomorrow. I wanted to repair his every yesterday.
But I wouldn’t lie to him.
I would tell him all the truth little-by-little as he and his questions grew, knowing the myths and stories we tell ourselves about family never truly protect us in the end.