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Today.
I'm sitting in the Westport cabin next to a roaring fire while a light summer storm blows on the river outside the windows. We'll be moving on to our next adventure next week, and I'm thinking about the summer we've spent here.

Day 1.
We arrive on a rainy evening to a house on a beautiful river that has no electricity or running water. No, that's not quite true. When we turn on the pump, water gushes out from a severed pipe under the kitchen floor. Which we know because the floorboards aren't attached so we can easily lift one up to reveal the half-drowned crypt beneath -- a graveyard for plastic milk bottles, for reasons I will not spend time attempting to fathom. Oh well. At least we remain hydrated from above as well as below. There's plenty of water coming from the ceiling, fresh from the clouds, with only a tinge of roofing tar.

We look at each other for a while, each reading the other's face for whether we are going to abandon the whole idea of living here and just find a motel that'll take us and the dogs for the next two and a half months. But finally, with a nod, we acknowledge that we won't turn back now. We take stock of the task ahead.

The main room is full of furniture in various states of decomposition, most of which seems to have come with the house when it was purchased decades ago from an even then long-defunct boys' camp. The floor -- which itself is comprised of boards of wood that seem to be in a state of disagreement amongst themselves about which way is horizontal -- is covered in threadbare rugs with a zeal for one-way transmogrification (into dust). And on top of all of this is a pile consisting of the summary of five years of modern living, most of which seems completely pointless now that we've clearly returned to basics.

As Asa goes out onto the porch -- most of the slate tiles of which have been torn out and removed, leaving bumps like concrete roots in the resulting stone jungle -- and takes a maul to the most accessible and least moldy furniture, I start and tend to a fire in the huge stone fireplace that acts as the centerpiece of the room. (In the dark, I can only see the outline of its majestic form. It won't be until later that I notice the yellow expanding insulation that Asa and his brother used to seal up the cracks in the stone twenty years ago.) As I feed pages of a mold-eaten zoological volume from 1880 into the flames, I can't help thinking of two young fugitives in a fairy tale who've stumbled upon what is obviously a witch's house in the woods. Slowly but surely, we begin to revel in the adventure.

Today.
There's a comfortable familiarity now to the sound of raindrops falling into pots in the kitchen and the faint smell of gas that leaks out whenever the hot water is on for too long. A floorboard is leaning up against a wall -- surprisingly, it was the only one that gave up under our weight  in all this time and broke to reveal a four-foot drop to the ground below. There's a collection of shells on the porch that we've gathered on our daily walks on the beach. The dogs are sitting by the river and wistfully watching the droplets hit the water. I think they, too, know somehow that our time here is almost up. Maybe they know that if we come back next summer, this house and its decades of do-it-yourself fixer-upper history will probably be gone.

Something about our time here turned this abandoned witch's hut into a home, and we'll be sad to see it go. But it's given me faith that anything can be an adventure worth having, and that's not a bad thing by which to be remembered.

But for now, please excuse me. Our rain pots are overflowing.