When it came time for me and Sarah to go to our friend’s wedding, Aaron decided to crash it, and he arrived in style. When he stepped out of his low, old-man Buick in cowboy boots and a tight parchment-colored vintage three-piece suit, his shadowy blue eyes found mine and the round gears of his jaw shifted under his suntanned skin. I had never before been so curious about a person.
Within weeks, he was back down in Minneapolis. He and his friend Rob were planning to pilot Rob’s houseboat all the way down the Mississippi, from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Rob’s boat on the river looked more like a little log cabin with a woodstove in the center than a river rider. As at Aaron’s house, its walls were nearly choked with paintings and found objects, and the two of them spent their free time tweaking the interior for their trip. In the meantime, Aaron picked up day work with a stone mason and dated me. After going to art openings and museums and rock shows and his favorite diners, we’d sit on the steps outside my college apartment and talk for hours. One night, after he left, my roommate, the theologian, said, “Holy shit, when the two of you get together you take on this really strong accent.”
The cadence of the talk I grew up with, which I didn’t realize had faded, was coming back.
Aaron and Rob had spent all their time perfecting their houseboat abode and none working on the engine, so when it failed to start up, their Mississippi trip was called off. I was secretly glad. Aaron was staying most nights at my place, anyway. He had been sleeping on a pallet of blankets in his cement-floored warehouse studio space, so giving him a proper bed felt like the most practical thing to do.
The first night we spent together we stayed up in bed until the wee hours, watching the light of dawn creep up the window shades as I lay there in his arms, trading memories of Park Rapids school lunch. We recalled the windowless dungeon that was the middle school’s basement cafeteria and the route there that took us through the dark boiler room, pitted with surprise puddles of water that soaked our white Keds. We joked about the way the gruff lunch ladies, in their housedresses and hairnets, clocked out perfect balls of mashed potatoes onto our plates, the synthetic potato-bud mash as smooth as nylons. These shared fruit-cocktail and hamburger-gravy memories were amusing to him, but the fact that we had grown up eating the same crappy lunches absolutely slayed me. I howled and curled into a fetal position, doubled up with recognition.
In the mornings, we listened to the radio in my bedroom—K1400 AM, an oldies station for seniors that played “The Music of Your Life.” I started wearing a robe. In the mornings, we’d get up, eat basted eggs, and then I’d send him off to work with a tub of bean soup stuffed with three kinds of smoked meat from the family meat market: country sausage, bacon, and the pink bits whittled from a long-simmered hock. He’d look at it with a smile—“This should get me through!”—accustomed as he was to lean turkey sandwiches with sprouts. This gave me a charge, as I was already hanging part of my self-esteem on my cooking, well on my way to becoming a feeder.
I felt timeless with him and blurted this out one day, immediately wishing I could take it back. Shit, I thought. I don’t even know what that means. Mercifully, Aaron understood. He said he felt the same.
—
That Christmas, when I was back in Park Rapids to see my dad, Aaron introduced me to his house. Located four hours from Minneapolis, twenty-five minutes from our hometown, five minutes from the nearest gas station, and a mile down a snaking dirt path, Aaron’s house was so lodged in the woods that it felt like we were traveling back in time.
It was so rough and so wild, even the road was homemade. To make it, Aaron had followed the faint stamped-down line of a deer trail all the way through the eighty-acre piece. After cutting the trees with a chain saw, the small brush with a gas-powered brush cutter, and the high grass with a machete, he was able to heave and bounce down the road in his four-wheel-drive Ford.
But now, when we came to the driveway, he stopped. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Snow’s too deep. We have to walk in.”
“Too deep for the four-wheel-drive?”
I couldn’t believe I wasn’t wearing decent winter boots. City living had made me soft, my footwear unfit for anything but a shoveled sidewalk. I felt hopelessly un-local. The snow swooped across the driveway in an even wave, broken only by the fine string of oval hoof holes left by deer delicately plucking their way across the road. We were doing the same, but indelicately, me tromping in rapidly soaking leather boots, Aaron in proper winter mucks.
“It’s just another half mile,” he said. Halfway there, the cold wind invaded my lungs and I realized I was having an asthma attack.
After stopping three times along the way, we arrived at the end of the road. There, on a hill above a wide, frozen waterway, stood his house. It looked old, like it had been there a long time. He explained how he’d built it, over the course of two years, without any electric power. He’d dug the foundation with a shovel and then started raising the sides: four large log poles on each side, spaced eight feet apart. It was basically a pole shed. He planned the ceiling to be fourteen feet high, so that it would feel lofty inside, even though the footprint was only twenty-four by fourteen feet.
The padlock on the front door was unhitched. Aaron turned the latch and pushed open the nine-foot-tall door, a giant’s entrance into a tiny house. We walked in and were met with the spicy aroma of fresh wood. It was like walking into the inside of a barrel and smelled exactly like the woolen work shirts he wore to the sawmill.
To the left there was a shipman’s alcove kitchen, its shelves holding a few colorful spice jars, boxes of tea, and metal canisters of sugar, flour, and cornmeal. Taking up most of the kitchen was a huge vintage white stove with four wide burners and a lake of shiny white enamel between them, with two identical oval rust holes burned out on each side. A large speckled black kettle sat squarely on one of the burners and on the other, a wire cone-shaped contraption.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That’s my toaster.”
I’d seen this artifact, along with the water kettle, in antiques stores before, but never in action. Here, they made sense. The ceiling in the kitchen was a network of rough beams he’d cut with a hand saw, with open joints and wedges shimmed in the corners to make them as level as he could. Freshly constructed in 1995, the place looked like it could have been built in 1895.