It was the grandest sort of relief to be doing something with my hands, where I could see results, after talking to students for months about ideas which sometimes seemed to evaporate between saying them and listening to them.
I had already coaxed a fine, old Queen Anne house into something delightful, for ourselves and our friends.
Dean called one spring day and asked if I would like to rebuild an original Iowa log house for him, just outside of town. I said I didn't know anything about log houses, but he persisted, and I agreed.
In the course of doing that, the owner of the land who had sold Dean his plot of land and settler's cabin, suggested that I should have my own cabin, and that if I wished, he would sell me an acre of land. That is how it started.
I knew the place, adjacent to Dean's cabin, where I often went for a lunch break, on a steep hillside, where evidence remained that the children from the house Dean was beginning to resurrect had come to play, and lost their toys.
I bought the land, found another original settler cabin about twenty miles away, dismantled it, and moved it to Saetre. In Iowa, Norwegian "Saetre"--a high mountain meadow where cattle went in Summer to forage and to begin the cheese production, was spelled, "Sattre". "Sat-tree" in English. "Sat-treh" in Norwegian.
That is where Mari and I were married, in 1982, in a not-quite-finished log house, with jazz musicians, and salmon sent from the Pacific Northwest by my brother, with a horse-drawn wagon and sunflowers and wedding dress modeled on Hungarian traditional dress but with Hmong artistry. You need not ask: it is a large, beautiful world.
"A party at Saetre!", we often said. Our hearts are there, still. Our friends came there. We had Wisconsin corn boils, and potluck parties, and wine and wonderful times.
The west deck was large, a full story above ground level. A great Shagbark Hickory stood resolute where it had first come to birth, long before any of us had come to the idea, up through the deck, with great, spreading branches it occasionally decided it could do without because it had a better idea. But I had an idea, too. I wanted to build some bird feeders to hang from those branches just outside the deck railing, where I could think about something more enjoyable than trying to explain why I did not believe in angels or devils or eternal damnation of any kind.
"A platform!", I thought, not a feeder tube, "where I could see birds come and go as they pleased. I went to Lyle Cary, the best machine shop owner in a long ways. He listened, and bent steel to obey art. For a cover, we overturned steel sliding sleds for kids, intended for snow and hill rides. I bent oak bands around a circular feed base. Beneath the base, I hung a double-hung window counter-weight, to frustrate the harmonies of the wind trying to whip the beast into a wrecking ball.
God, what a joy! There came, not only birds, but on rare evenings, or rare early mornings, a family of flying squirrels, as beautiful as night and light together, to ignore us as they fed.
This summer, traveling to celebrate with Spencer, I saw one of those two feeders in the driveway of the home that had once been our home, two generations before Spencer and Sophie grew up there, and I asked Marty if I could have it again. And so it was.
It is in our yard now, in Tucson, a Saetre symbol in the Sonoran Desert, hanging now, not from a Shagbark Hickory, but a Palo Verde tree, ready to knit our lives together again.
And I am trying not to cry. [My other blog is at: www. TucsonOldTimers.blogspot.com }
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