Free How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen Page A

talk to, merry and funny and darkly wry, in that (by now familiar) Maine way. They embraced every challenge: they scraped and sanded and then painted the ornate old squares of ceiling tin they’d had to carefully jigger into place and cut to accommodate the overhead recessed lights; they planed and sanded and endlessly polyurethaned the rough, weather-beaten dimensional countertop planks into smooth, richly golden expanses. They weren’t put off by the patinaed old copper from the 1906 bathtub Brendan bought from a guy north of Waterville. After scratching their heads and discussing the matter for a while, they flattened it overnight under heavy weights, then they cut it into separate sheets and siliconed them to the bar-top plywood with sandbags and clamps. They carefully cut out the old drain and made a beautiful medallion in the middle of the countertop and jointed the separate pieces neatly with copper nails.
    By the beginning of summer, after months of hard, painstaking work for our contractors, our new kitchen was finally finished. Everyone had been remarkably patient and coolheaded throughout, maybe because we all knew we were creating something beautiful, and that doesn’t happen overnight. On the very last day, the contractorsgrouted the Mexican tile backsplash, replaced the glass in the door to the mudroom, shaped the copper edges around the bar top and affixed them, and then they were done.
    After they’d swept the wide-board pumpkin-pine floor and packed up their tools and driven away, we wandered around the big, airy, dazzling room, slightly befuddled, dazed with the joy of having our kitchen and dining room, which had been so coldly ugly before, be so warmly beautiful now, all one big room instead of divided, with two more windows and the brick chimney exposed, the walls freshly painted a warm neutral buttery yellow, everything gleaming and rich with history, every detail exactly what we’d wanted. The finished kitchen looked eccentrically, cozily resplendent, at least to us. There was wavy semi-opaque glass in the upper cabinet doors. The stained-glass window we’d designed and had built at a glass place on Forest Avenue was installed in the enormous side window the contractors had uncovered when they gutted the room. They’d also punched a fourth window through the newly exposed brick chimney, so the room was flooded with natural light. The (new) porcelain sink had been set into the countertop and hooked up. The tall wooden door with beveled glass and carved details that used to hang in the front entryway was now a swinging door between the kitchen and the foyer.
    The kitchen felt as if it had been in the house forever; our aim all along had been to have people walk in and assume that, feel it instinctively, and say, “How lucky that you didn’t have to renovate when you moved in!” Our house was old and tall and beautiful, and it wanted to feel comfortable and attractive in its outfit; it also wanted an outfit befitting its dignified age, its 1850s vintage. Ridiculous as it sounds, I couldn’t help thinking that the house was rejoicing in its new duds, even preening a little, and I didn’t blame it.
    As for me, I was awash in a contented happiness so powerful it almost made me melancholy. After more than four fun, passionate,adventurous years together, Brendan and I had found our home and had made it our own, together, and now we had the amazing good luck to live here. The feeling was so unfamiliar, I had to think about it to parse out what it was. After a moment, I realized it was the utter rightness of where I was and the person I was with. I had never experienced this before in my life. My marriage, though good, had been fraught; the house my ex-husband and I had renovated together, doing all the work ourselves and fighting all the while, had always felt like it was his, not mine, because he had controlled the decisions. Now, I felt nothing but rootedness and