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Living without a kitchen for a season due to an extensive, much-wanted renovation is a first-world problem, of course, especially if you have enough money (albeit barely) to eat out a couple of nights a week as well as another house to decamp to the rest of the time.  So I’m not complaining when I say that we’ve had to adapt this winter, strategically, in certain ways, and also that we’ve discovered what it means to be forced to eat in restaurants: it’s not the treat you might think it would be.

For the past couple of months, maybe almost three, our Portland house has been filled with the banging and screaming of power tools during weekday work hours, and everything in it is covered with dust. We spend two nights a week there so I can go to my two Pilates classes and work my Thursday soup kitchen shift, and also so we can go out for Wednesday drinks night with our group of writer pals – our only social life, these days.

Brendan’s family farmhouse in rural New Hampshire, where we live the rest of the time, is isolated and remote, and winter is not over, although it’s late April, so when we’re here, we tend to burrow in and work all day, take long walks, cook much-anticipated meals, watch whole TV series at night (“Nashville” and “Battlestar Galactica,” lately), go to bed early, and sleep deeply till morning.

It’s just the three of us: Brendan, Dingo, and me. We’re a compatible and democratic little unit; there is no strife or discord amongst our ranks, and although no one is strictly in charge, things get done as they should, according to the strengths of each. The house is well-guarded against interlopers, chipmunks, porcupines, and UPS drivers, for instance, thanks to Dingo’s superior hearing and barking abilities and diligent – even obsessive – attention to outside goings-on from his lookout post on the window seat. We can go to town to replenish the larder thanks to Brendan, the only one with a driver’s license; he also keeps the fires burning in the fireplace, moves the laundry along when it needs noodging, and makes the best Italian food for hundreds of miles around. As for me, I sing  along with CDs and try to keep conversations lively, for morale. And so our little ship sails forth.

This weekend, the air temperatures are slightly less frigid than last weekend. A warmer wind blew in during the week and melted the lake and much of the snow. Yesterday, on our walk, the dirt road was soft and strewn with squished baby frogs who’d gotten in the way of the ten or twelve cars, mostly Subarus, of course, that drive along the road each day. The lake was a rich steel blue, choppy in the fresh breeze, shading to black around the edges. The mountains were cobalt hulks under a cloud-dense, abruptly sunny sky. Down at the beaver pond, we counted two new dams, making a grand total of five; their population is thriving, exploding even. A gosling swam behind its parents as they came bustling over to check us out. The little protruding hummocks near the shore had newborn, spindly stalks and greening moss.

Yesterday, in the early afternoon, Dingo and I went out to sit on the porch and take stock of the outdoors. We lounged in the sunlight, smiling at each other. This was a strange, tense week; the news close to home was terrible, and the news further away was as bad as it always is. But here we were, dog and human, on a porch in weak but certain sunlight. The trees were all still bare, with knobby little buds, but the grass was turning green, and the crocus spears were finally poking out of the dirt.

As befits the change of season, we’ve been eating and drinking much more lightly – less meat, less booze, less butter for the humans, less food in general for the dog. But even in the most ascetic of diets, there has to be some indulgence, although that becomes relative: a decadent pleasure in the early spring is different from winter’s sausage and cheese and olives, heavier, chewier luxuries.

Last night, at cocktail hour, I opened a bottle of Pinot Noir, poured a couple of glasses, and set out a plate of hors d’oeuvres: slices of English cucumber, whole red radishes, flaxseed-and-sesame crackers, and a bowl of spicy hummus. With our glasses of wine diminishing at our elbows, we devoured the whole plate while Dingo lay at our feet, accepting any bits of cucumber or radish that came his way.

Running a marathon is a brave, ridiculous act of endurance and hope and derring-do and personal triumph.  It transcends politics. It transcends everything. It’s a big throng of people, tens of thousands of them, all nationalities and races and religions and colors and shapes and ages, shoulder to shoulder, striving together for the same thing, to the same end: to get to the finish line.

I ran the New York City marathon in 2002, after 9/11. All the past year, I’d felt sad, helpless, angry, horrified, devastated, shocked, all the things everyone else around me was feeling. Running the marathon went beyond the personal to the civic, communal, soulful.

While I was training, I raised money for an independently funded track program for inner-city kids, which let me feel I was helping someone, somehow; I needed that. On race day, after years of watching from the sidelines, it was a thrill to join the crowd pounding and sweating their way through all five boroughs.

A few miles from the finish line, I started crying: there I was, in Central Park, I’d made it. With less than two miles to go, I stopped running to hobble, wrung out and in pain. The runner next to me cheered me on. We’d been running side by side since the Bronx; I listened to him and ran the rest of the way. After I crossed the finish line, euphoric, I was grinning and high on endorphins and relief and pride, walking around with a space blanket over my shoulders, my legs shaking.

Who would bomb the finish line of a marathon? Why?

This morning, I poached some eggs and served them over spicy kidney beans with avocado alongside and Cholula chipotle hot sauce on top.  We couldn’t finish our breakfasts; this almost never happens.

I learned how to make stir fry from my college freshman-year roommate. Actually, Lisa was my second college freshman-year roommate. My first one and I didn’t much like each other. And I hated living on campus. I was two years older than most of the other freshmen, due to my high school chairman’s giving me an out-of-date financial aid form during my senior year of high school, and then my own inertia during my first year off when I should have been re-applying for financial aid, forcing me to defer a second year.

Finally, in 1982, I got to Reed and moved into one of the “cross-canyon” dorms, a bunch of identically cold, modern one-story buildings with linoleum floors and track lighting and soulless little bedrooms barely big enough for one person, let alone two strangers. After living and working in Europe for a year, and then another year living back at home with my mother and sister in upstate New York, working at a construction job, I found dorm life both too claustrophobic and too public. I hated the big cold communal unisex bathrooms as much as I hated having to share a room. And I loathed the food at Commons, the Reed dining room.

I petitioned to be allowed to break my room-and-board plan. Because of my quote-unquote “relative maturity,” the authorities let me. After my first winter break, I moved all of my things into a plain little apartment near campus to live with my friend Lisa, whose other roommate had just moved out. Rent was $125 a month for both of us, and in return we each got our own bedroom, plus a bathroom with a tub, a little balcony and an open kitchen-living room. It was nothing special, but I set up my record player, hung my Japanese parasol over the single bed, and set all my books on the little bookshelf. I found a lamp at a thrift store, and I was in business.

Lisa and I had, on the whole, an easy, warm, uncomplicated friendship, unlike my relationship with my first roommate, who frankly hated my guts (something to do with locking the door to have sex with my boyfriend and making her wait till we were done? something to do with my personality, which was earnest and perky and Pollyannaish in those days? both? other things? well, I didn’t like her much, either).

Here in my little box of a room with its cheap hollow door, thin walls, low ceiling, and sliding glass window, studying in my bed, leaning against my green corduroy “husband” pillow, listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash while incense burned on my nightstand, I felt I could breathe finally.

It was Lisa’s apartment, though. I moved in to an already-existing household. She had a certain way of doing things and certain expectations of me.  I have always been a deeply private person. Lisa liked to come into my room in the evening and perch at the foot of my bed and have talks. To me, this was invasive; to her, it was cozy and congenial. She liked to fret about my current relationship and tell me what was what; I preferred to live and let live, no advice, no judgment, no noodging. I chafed sometimes under her big-sisterly clucking and wide-eyed admonishments. She was sensitive and could sense me chafing, and, hurt, she retreated. Things were a little chilly until I approached her to assuage her wounds.

“I’ve always been this way,” I told her with my usual earnest eagerness. “I am weird, I know that. I’m so private.”

“You are not weird! No no!” she told me, shaking her dark curly head and talking in a funny, high half-duck half-Japanese voice.  “I just love you! I love to talk to you.”

One thing Lisa and I agreed on absolutely was food. When I moved in, she already had a well-established everyday menu, and, to keep things simple, I fell right into it. I loved the consistency, the lack of thought it required, the tastiness and healthiness of it. And it was cheap, and I always knew what was for dinner. And breakfast.

On Saturday mornings, Lisa and I walked up the hill to the Safeway on S.E. Woodstock and did the week’s shopping. Without discussion, we always bought a staggering heap of vegetables, including Chinese cabbage, bok choy (I can still hear her trilling “bok choy!” in that funny voice, cracking me up in the produce section as she flung a big bunch or two of it into our cart), and hot little Chinese red peppers. We bought baking potatoes, one each per night, as well as chicken breasts and ground beef (we both hated tofu), soy sauce, and sesame oil. Shopping for our everyday breakfast was even simpler, because every breakfast was the same: strong French roast coffee with half and half and sugar; English muffins with real butter and raspberry jam.

Every night, in our tiny galley kitchen, we pricked and oiled two huge russet baking potatoes and stuck them into a hot oven. Then we stood side by side, chopping everything we needed for that night’s meal, nice and small, a good assortment, a little more than we thought we’d need. We grated ginger and minced garlic, little heaps of both.

Lisa’s recipe went like this: Over high heat, sauté the meat first in soy sauce and sesame oil, a little of the garlic and ginger – cut-up chicken breasts or a wad of ground beef – then take out and set aside. In more sesame oil and soy sauce, sauté the rest of the ginger and garlic, the minced scallions and hot red pepper till just soft. Add the rest of the vegetables in this order, stirring for a minute or two in between: slant-cut carrots and celery first, then thinly sliced red or yellow Bell peppers, then zucchini and mushrooms, then broccoli florets, then the chopped greens. Stir the entire time. Add more oil or a little water if it starts to stick. Add the meat back in with its accumulated juices just before it’s all done and stir well and cover for a minute or two.

These stir fries were incredible, and I’ve never had a better one; 30 years later, I still make them according to Lisa’s recipe and still serve them over the scooped-out innards of enormous, well-baked russet potatoes. The fluffy white potato soaks up the sesame-soy-ginger-garlic-meat juice gravy. The vegetables, because they’re all cut small, meld together.

Into the crackling potato skins, Lisa taught me to put butter and salt and pepper and fold them together into madly delicious tacolike things.

With loaded plates, we sat at our little dinette with its gold-flecked Formica top, on matching chairs with padded seats, and feasted. Lisa didn’t drink, and neither did I in those days, or at least not much, so we didn’t have booze. We always ate with chopsticks. There were never any leftovers. The next night, we always started fresh.

We both woke up feeling well-rested and chipper this morning. I made French toast with vanilla and cinnamon, custardy on the inside and crisp on the outside, and served it with hot wild blueberries with maple syrup. We drank big cups of coffee and then we took our usual 4-mile fast walk over hill and dale along the lake and through the woods. The sun was shining, there was a breath of warmth in the air, not one car passed us the entire time, and the road wasn’t too muddy.

We came home warm and a little out of breath. After we’d shucked our jackets and shoes, I opened a window to let the fresh air into the house, whose atmosphere is tinged with a winter’s worth of wood smoke. It’s not unpleasant, in fact it reminds me of BBQ potato chips, but it’s a decidedly wintry smell. And it’s time for spring.

Then we sat at the table at our computers, tapping away like industrious, wholesome little chipmunks, just as we’ve been doing nonstop for the past many months.  We have our formation: I sit at the end of the table, looking at the long meadows stretching down to the lake and the hulking mountains beyond and the huge sky above. Brendan sits to my left, facing the short meadow that slopes down to the beaver pond, Dundee Hill rising behind it, the same huge sky above. My long meadows have the birch trees; his short meadow has the lone, ancient crabapple planted far from the orchard and a lone, short, handsome oak.

Dingo lies either sacked out behind Brendan’s chair, half on and half off the braided oval rug, off-duty, or vigilantly on the windowseat, keeping his eyes out for invading nogoodniks and dastardly porcupines. Sometimes he leaps up barking like a gunshot, giving us both near-heart attacks and causing us both to yell DINGO! SHUT UP! We shove him out the door to the porch, where he leaps onto the grass and rushes to the dirt driveway by the barn, barking so hard his whole body convulses. Sometimes it’s the beleaguered UPS man, sometimes it’s a car turning around at the foot of the drive, sometimes it’s a flock of wild turkeys, but mostly, there’s nothing there at all.

We’ve been calling this the Year of the Woodshed, but it’s turning into two years: two years of nonstop effort, paying for our ongoing house renovation, getting our shit together, working hard to get settled and secure and replenish our savings account, taking no vacations and hardly any days off, waking up every morning with a to-do list and a sense of urgent pressure, clenching our jaws at night in our sleep, lying awake in the early morning hours, stewing and worrying, wondering whether we can get it all done.

Of course, writing is the only thing we want to be doing. It’s our calling, passion, and ideal occupation. We’re not working at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart for minimum wage. We aren’t forced to sell our bodies or drugs or pyramid schemes or fruit by the roadside or Jesus.

And we have this farmhouse to escape to when the banging and sawing get to be too much. We’re free and lucky. We know it.

Anyway, so there we all were, at just before noon today, everyone at his or her station, doing his or her job.

After a while, Brendan looked up at me. I looked back at him.

“I am so sick of this shit,” he said.

“I am, too,” I said.

“We need a vacation.”

“We don’t get a vacation.”

“Fuck that,” he said.

“FUCK that,” I echoed.

“I want tequila,” he said.

“It’s Saturday,” I pointed out. “So we’re allowed.”

“I don’t care what day it is,” he said. The car keys were in his hand and his shoes were on. Dingo and I caught up with him and then we were all in the car, off to town.

We came home with a bottle of Herradura Silver, some grapefruits and limes, a People magazine, and, because we needed it and therefore it sort of justified the gas we used to get to Hannaford and back, a 12-pack of toilet paper.

So now, here we sit at our computers, still in formation, me here, Brendan there, Dingo on his windowseat. But now, at our elbows are daytime cocktails: hefty slugs of tequila shaken over ice with the juice of one fat grapefruit and one juicy lime, poured with the ice into tumblers and garnished with thin jalapeno slices.  Between us is an open bag of Lay’s Simply Natural thick cut sea salted potato chips. The only sounds in here are the clinking of the ice as we drink, the crunching of potato chips, the rapid-fire tapping of our computer keys, and the gentle, yearning exhalations of Dingo as he lifts his wet black snout to the tabletop, trolling for a chip or two.

It’s 3:00 in the afternoon. I’m sure that one of the primary warning signs of alcoholism is day drinking, especially of hard liquor. FUCK that. I’m going to run a hot bath and make another round of drinks and go and lie in the tub with People magazine.

Another Haddock Recipe

I can’t stop cooking haddock. It’s cheap and local, so fresh it quivers on its shaved ice in the store.

My new thing with haddock is the following meal, of which we are currently enamored:

Simmer a cup of well-rinsed red rice in 1 ¾ cups chicken broth.

In a big skillet in plenty of good oil, sauté 2 chopped leeks and 2 chorizo sausages and 6 chopped cloves of garlic.

Cut 1 pound of haddock filets into chunks and marinate in the juice of 1 lemon and 1 tablespoon harissa spices (or paste).  Add to the leeks and chorizo and gently poach on both sides. Stir well.

Meanwhile, chop as many cloves of garlic as you like and add to ½ cup chicken broth in a huge pot. Steam a pound of baby spinach, covered.

Serve rice, spinach, and fish-leeks all together in 2 big shallow bowls. Add hot sauce as desired.

The sun came out today. It was fiercely bright. All day, the sky was a mad, deep blue. We emerged from the house this morning blinking like underground rodents in sudden klieg lights. The air was so mild, I stripped down to a T-shirt by the end of our walk.  My snow boots sank into the soft, mushy, wet skin of the road.

The streams are all running again. The air smells like water; that dry-ice quality of deep winter is gone. The snow is all porous ice from melting and refreezing and melting. Dingo’s fur looks mangy, clumpy: he’s about to blow his undercoat.

There’s a kind of bird around here I call the taxi bird – because they’re as ubiquitous as taxis in New York, and when I first came here four years ago, that was my primary point of reference. The taxi birds are back, singing their two-note descending call from treetops all along the dirt road. And right outside the window where I’m sitting, the little maple tree has buds on it, very little and very hard, but buds nonetheless.

A while ago, I knocked off work and went out with a glass of wine and sat on the porch in my jeans and socks and T-shirt and bathrobe – my winter writer’s uniform. This is always my favorite time of day, but today was especially nice. Dingo lay next to me, ears and nostrils all aquiver, but there was nothing going on for him to bark at. The sun was setting and the air was absolutely still. After days of howling winds and lowering fog and dripping eaves, the serene silence felt as shocking as the sudden warmth.

I came back inside and sat at the table again, looking out the window. When the light on Dundee Hill changed from hot pink to deep purple, I stuck a cookie sheet filled with cut-up new potatoes – as it happened, hot pink, deep purple along with humdrum beige — and whole peeled garlic cloves, tossed in peanut oil with black pepper and kosher salt, into a hot oven.

Marinating in a big glass bowl on the counter are skinless, boneless chicken thighs. Earlier, I made a sort of Spanish-y marinade of dry white wine, tomato paste, lemon juice, chopped olives, chopped garlic, a whole sliced onion, paprika, the rest of the sage that’s been in the fridge drawer since Rosie made her Thanksgiving stuffing, a whiff of cinnamon, saffron, and black pepper. I’ll brown the thighs first, then put them in a bowl while I simmer the sauce, then add them back in when the onions are soft and the wine has cooked off. Meanwhile, I’ll steam some broccoli in chicken broth, and then we’ll eat.

All day, in my head, I’ve been reciting the e. e. cummings poem that starts,

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful…

Actually, I’ve really just been thinking the words “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” over and over, and the rest of it sort of fills in chockablock with a galumphing joyful rhythm around those two words, along with “far and wee.”

The other day in Whole Foods, as we were shopping for groceries to bring to the farmhouse for five nights, I said jokingly, self-mockingly, to the cashier who was ringing up our groceries, “Did you notice how healthy our food is?”

Instead of giving me shit for the heap of organic produce, the organic free-range eggs, the organic red rice and gluten-free organic pasta and organic steel-cut gluten-free oats, wild-caught Alaskan sockeye, free-range bison, organic free-range chicken thighs, and so forth, he said earnestly, “Oh my God, doesn’t it feel good to buy a bunch of food like this and go home and eat it?”

Caught off-guard by his fervor, I laughed.

“Yes,” I admitted, “it does.”

We paid $264 for five sacks of food, loaded it all into the Subaru, and off we went, leaving the contractors behind in our gutted kitchen to make loud banging noises all day. We drove the hour and fifteen minutes from the coast up into the mountains on narrow, sleepy, quiet country roads, pitted now with frost heaves and slick in places with refrozen ice. It was dusk. It always seems to be dusk lately, lingering late-winter twilight, a chilly pinkish-then-bluish waning light on glowing, slushy snow, a lowering fog through bare branches, and the mineral smell of water that somehow presages the sudden, mad, wild, manic, aggressively sexual explosion of life that means spring up here in the north.

We got to the farmhouse just after dark, backed the car up to the porch on the snowy lawn, and unloaded the groceries, Dingo’s bed, our backpacks, and the sack of books I’m supposed to read. I put everything away while Brendan turned the water back on and let it run in the pipes, turned up the heat, checked the wood supply in the cabinet by the fireplace, and made a fire. We drank red wine to go with the red dinner I made: baked salmon with harissa spice rub, steamed red chard, and red rice.

The next day at lunchtime, yesterday, I mixed the leftover salmon, rice, and greens all together and tossed them with a little mayonnaise for a madly delicious instant fish salad. Last night, Brendan made moist, dense, meaty, slightly gamey bison burgers, Yukon Gold wedge oven fries, and a heap of steamed baby spinach; I made a sauce of (organic, Omega-3) mayonnaise, stone-ground mustard, (organic) ketchup, and Cholula chipotle hot sauce to go with everything. We ate the burgers on springy, bready toasted gluten-free hamburger buns.

After a breakfast this morning of steel-cut oatmeal with maple syrup, cinnamon, and enormous frozen blueberries that tasted like distilled summer, we had the same bison burger meal again for lunch, this time with steamed chard, so tonight’s supper is just vegetables: meaty round “Frost Kist” artichokes and sliced baby zucchini sautéed with a bit of chicken broth and plenty of fresh tarragon, with olive oil and kosher salt.

Meanwhile, I have a pot of Jacob’s Cattle heirloom beans soaking for tomorrow’s baked beans, which we’ll eat with steamed broccoli and organic chicken Andouille.

I keep thinking about what the fresh-faced, wide-eyed young guy at Whole Foods said. He really meant it, without either ironic hipster self-mockery or smug hippie self-righteousness: “Doesn’t it feel good to eat this way?”

On our walk this morning, the same fast, hard four-mile walk up and down hills to the end of the dirt road and back that Brendan, Dingo, and I take every morning at 11:00 when we’re here, I chuckled to myself at how wholesome my life has become, realizing that I haven’t eaten any junk food in more than ten years. I’ve had plenty of potato chips and dark or bittersweet chocolate and gluten-free ginger cookies and Red Hot Blue corn chips, but they’re all made with organic or at least healthy ingredients; they’re not what I’m referring to.

Back in the years when I ate gluten and occasionally smoked cigarettes when I drank booze and lived in industrial Brooklyn and thought I’d live forever, I used to love to scarf a sack of White Castle jalapeno sliders with onion rings and fries, late at night, drunk and starving. God, they were good. I used to love to go to Coney Island for fried clams and Nathan’s hot dogs. I cured my frequent hangovers with a deli breakfast: either a fried egg with melted American cheese and nitrate-laden bacon on a toasted, buttered roll, or a greasy Western omelet on toasted rye with 8 packets of (non-organic) ketchup. If that didn’t work, I went to a hot dog cart for lunch and inhaled a couple of obscenely juicy, tasty hot dogs fished out of filthy water and served with onions and mustard on stale industrial buns. And I drank a can of ice-cold, bitterly bubbly Coke.

I loved French fries. I still love French fries, but now they have to be gluten-free and fried in oil that’s gluten-free, which is not easy to find, so I rarely eat them anymore, but back then, I ordered them every chance I got. I used to cure my severe bouts of PMS with Little Debbie peanut butter bars and Hostess Ding-Dongs and Entenmann’s chocolate cake. I would rush into a deli, any deli, grab a cellophane-wrapped sugar-and-chemical sweet, and stomp moodily, crabbily, despairingly along the sidewalk, shoving the thing in my mouth and barely chewing it, ripping the spongy, soft, gooey, sugary, artificially-flavored thing with my molars and swallowing it as fast as I could. My mouth exploded with animal satiation. It always worked.

That was twelve, fifteen, twenty years ago. I’ve been gluten-free since 2002, for eleven years; my eating has shifted since then from a purely pleasurable and decadent and fearless gourmandise to something else. I don’t regret this, and I don’t ever miss any of that stuff. I’m older now; my appetites have changed in many ways. I’ve known since my fortieth birthday, when I went through a sort of existential crisis slash spiritual awakening and became viscerally aware for the first time of certain basic but terrible facts of human life, that I am certainly going to die. My fiftieth birthday last summer arrived with even more dire news, but this time it wasn’t a crisis. This time, being older and more seasoned and accustomed to bad news, I absorbed it without flinching: Not only am I going to die, but I’m going to get old.

Dingo already is old. The world as we know it also feels old, and dying, and drastically sick.

So yes, sweet, wholesome checkout man at the Whole Foods in Portland, Maine: It feels very good to eat like this. I’m grateful that I can.

I’m sitting at my desk in my study with a cup of coffee, catching my breath for a moment while Dingo has his morning nap on his bed at my feet.

My new book, “Blue Plate Special,” an autobiographical account of my life in food, is, as of yesterday, finished, edited, copyedited, and off to production; I’m hard at work on a second nonfiction book, the co-written memoir of a brilliant, fantastic female chef; and my next novel is hovering in the wings, under contract and 15,000 words in, waiting for me to return to it.

Meanwhile, our entire kitchen and dining room have recently been gut-demolished down to the joists and beams and brick. I can hear the contractor’s guys banging away down there, taking down the old posts from the wall that separated the dining room from the kitchen. We’re planning to make it all one big room so we can talk to guests at the table in the dining room while we cook. We’re putting a gas insert into the small dining room fireplace; we’ve always wanted to be able to have a fireplace in the kitchen, but this is close enough.

We sold the old, clinical melamine cabinets, the cold-as-tombstones granite countertops, and less than stellar appliances on Craigslist; people came and carted them away and gave us money for them, which struck us as a great deal. In their place will be wood and copper and butcher block and tile. Brendan found a hardworking, straight-talking guy up in Poland Spring who takes barely-used appliances out of rich people’s summer houses when they trade up for new ones; he resells them on consignment out of his barn for a fraction of what they would cost new. Later on today, he’s delivering our new butter-yellow Viking stove with gas burners and electric oven, plus a Bosch dishwasher whose didactic beeping thing he’s dismantled for us, and he’s keeping his eye out for a stainless steel Viking fridge with a bottom freezer drawer.

We’ve both been working (which is to say, writing) ourselves into puddles of melted butter to be able to pay for all this. Brendan has even more projects afoot right now than I do; we’re both a little dazed and burned out, but we have no regrets, at least no big ones. Buying an old house is exciting but daunting and something of a lifetime commitment, although my mother has assured me that it won’t always feel quite so overwhelming.

When we first walked into this house in October of 2011, we were struck with starry-eyed wonderment at its beauty and elegance. It wasn’t for sale; the downstairs apartment was for rent, but Brendan, who had found the listing, insisted that we go and see it anyway, on a hunch. We’d already looked at twelve other houses in Portland, and none of them was quite right.

“We can’t afford this place,” I said sadly, dazzled by the original plasterwork, the white fireplace mantles with decorative carving, the tall, graceful staircase. “There’s no way they’d sell it to us even if we could.”

Thanks to Brendan’s persistence, it turned out that the owners did want to sell, after all, and their asking price happened to be exactly the outer limit of what we could afford. Reader, we bought it.

Our tall Italianate brick house survived the 1866 Great Fire in Portland; we’re not sure what year it was built, but this much we do know. It has changed hands many, many times. Prior owners include several old, established New England families. In the 1920s, it was owned by a woman named Jennie Stein. It was a boys’ school for a while and later a Goodwill House for adults with Down syndrome; at some point, a sprinkler system was installed and the downstairs bathroom was made wheelchair-accessible.

By the time we bought the house, its decor was a sad testament to bad 1990s taste. The instant we had the deed in hand, we ripped out the shiny cockroach-colored Brazilian cherry from the foyer, kitchen, and dining room, and the ugly stained tan wall-to-wall carpeting upstairs and on the staircase. Under about four more layers – of linoleum and tar, cheap birch tongue-and-groove, and plywood – was the original pine and hemlock subfloor, beautiful, strong planks we had sanded and polyurethaned.

We found an awesome contractor who built window seats and cupboards and bookshelves in the two rooms upstairs. We found a clawfoot tub in the basement; he installed it in our bedroom. He also took out the yuppie upstairs bathroom with its MRI-like shower and horrible blue tile floor and enormous fall-of-Rome sink and put in an old-fashioned bowl sink set into a maple counter, a tiled shower, and a pine and hemlock floor. And he painted over the terrible institutional cold sky blue on every wall in the house: forest green in the study; deep blue in the bedroom; warm gold in the parlors; and warm off-whites in the foyer and staircase and hall.

Somewhere along the way, many decades ago, the house was divided into two apartments. We live in the first floor and front half of the second floor and rent out the back half of the second floor and entire third floor to the most excellent tenants in the history of the universe, a young couple whose presence in the house, along with their young female mutt, Tug, Dingo’s pal, makes it feel warm and happy and alive. Often I hear faint laughter and music from their half of the house and Tug’s racing paws upstairs.

This house was designed in a long-ago era of sweetness and light. The ceilings are very high, even on the second floor; the light-filled double front parlors have floor-to-ceiling bay windows and little fireplaces with tiled hearths and beveled mirrors over the mantles. We’ve half-jokingly nicknamed the place the Yankee Palazzo, because we feel like New England dukes in here.

Maybe we’re superstitious, but the place feels animate and sentient to us. And it seems to us that the house is extremely happy with its makeover – despite all the dust and noise and upheaval, the air feels even sweeter and lighter in here than when we bought it.

Demolition Kitchen breakfast

The contents of our kitchen now sit in boxes on a moving blanket on the living room floor and are also piled on one of the couches and the table in the bay window. We have nothing to cook with but a toaster oven and an electric kettle. For a fridge, we’re using our unheated entryway, the tiny tiled space between the two front doors. We wash our cups and plates and silverware in the downstairs bathroom sink, which clogs easily.

Toast two pieces of Canyon Bakehouse multigrain gluten-free bread in the toaster oven. Slather crunchy peanut butter on one slice and drizzle honey over it. Slap the other piece on top. Eat on a paper plate to catch the melted honey.