We moved to Ripton in a snow storm. Everything about our move was hurried. I was a ski coach in the winter which meant little extra time, but also extra hands to speed along the carry of boxes and furniture. The previous owners were in their 80s and had fallen behind in the maintenance a 130 year old home required. They had installed bits of charm: a carpet painted on the steps, an endless supply of daffodils in the yard. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over leaving this house,” Dottie said at the house closing. She and Bob both died a few years after the day we tracked snow through the kitchen with our college art posters and naive expectations for home ownership. On really hot days, you can still smell Bob’s pipe in the walls of the living room, the only space we wouldn’t refinish all the way down to the off-center timber framing.

“I think we should keep going,” my dad said through his dust mask. Around us lay hundreds of pounds of plaster lathing, rock wool insulation, bits of newspaper and paint that had been a part of the upstairs. It was knee deep and foreboding and baking in May sunshine.
“I’m not sure, dad,” I said entirely sure that we should, in fact, not keep going, sure that we should pause and clean up, sure that the mass of house that we’d liberated from decades of weight might rise up at any minute against our modernizing and take arms defending high heating bills and mold.
“Let’s keep going,” dad said and we did chipping off plaster and nails for another two hours until the pile of rubble went high enough that we had to duck from the ceiling as we walked over it. We paused only to hire six of the skiers I coached, to clad them in hazmat suits and to furnish them with snow shovels and garbage cans. It took four hours for the eight of us to fill a five ton waste container brimming with old house. It took four months and the type of herculean effort typically reserved for cathedrals and monuments from our contractor, Jeff Levesque and his network of colleagues to re-frame, re-insulate and drywall the rooms, to rebuild the bathroom, to refinish the floors and to make it a place we were proud of daily.

In the center of the remodeled space, I started Press Forward, writing copy for a Burlington design firm in secret for years, plotting and listing crookedly towards today, the happiest time of my professional life. In the adjacent room, Caroline would read college applications and marvel out loud at kids who particularly inspired her. “I can’t believe you saw this here,” Patty Ross once said of the house years after we moved in, the kindest compliment anyone ever paid us in our decade long caretaking of the corner of Natural Turnpike and Robbins Cross road.

One night a bat flew down the fireplace chimney. Once during the Super Bowl, a fire extinguisher was released in our stove to the relief of a plate of flaming nachos. Glen Plake once left a message on our answering machine. One of our next-door neighbors died of cancer. Once it snowed so much we shoveled the roof then jumped off it landing chest deep and happy. Patrick Johnson stayed with us on our couch following compartment syndrome surgery. We bought our first not secondhand couch. We hosted dinner parties and bonfires and stage race weekends and ski race participants and family. JS Woodward lives forever in our kitchen in chocolate chip recipes and pointed judgements about appliances. We hosted holiday White Elephant parties with the ski team. To this day copies of “A Very Graham Egan Christmas” are still circulating in small quantities to collectors of specialty holiday music. There was the terrible flood in Ripton in 2008 then Hurricane Irene in 2011, though Irene was less impacting to Ripton than the ‘08 storm, however devastating to the rest of the state. Calamity is inexact.

For four years, Caroline and I tried all manner of fertility treatments to have a child. We failed a lot and Caroline channeled much of the pain of childlessness into creativity. She sewed scarves and sold them online under the name Hue & Me. We went on vacations with the proceeds and pretended things would work out. We gave up trying to conceive in 2014 and bought cheap wine, which did the trick.

When Sam was born in 2015, the road from Porter Hospital never felt crazier, nor faster or more out of control. Only past the Green Mountain National Forrest sign beyond sand hill on the climb towards our house did the drizzle on the windshield feel soft and calming. We did not make a meal for forty days and people we did not know, from corners of Ripton we had not been, came to see Sam and to welcome him to the world.

The boards that creak: the third from the top step, the immediate step into the kitchen, the one in the living room near the thermostat. They have each cried out since we first set foot in the house and likely long before that.
“Never change these floors,” Peter Bell said when he came to our house for the first time as a college student. He was emphatic and correct. We failed, refinishing some and leaving the scuffs and scratches of thousands of trips to the refrigerator, the bathroom, the closet, the bedroom, leaving the stains of beer then baby food, drips of errant klister and chain lube, spilled coffee from late morning escapes and spilled popcorn from late night movies. Over these floors there is a single worn pathway, it stretches from late adolescence into adulthood and it is familiar and permanent, though it is not always easy to see.