The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie

Hail to our mother, who caused the messenger, the soldier, the worker,
Who scattered the seeds of her body
As she came forth from Paradise:
Great and white, fat with honeydew,
Her diadem a ring of captive queens.

Hail to the goddess who shines with her bright wings
Triumphant in the face of the deceiver.
Hail to our mother, who dropped her wings
Who poured forth abundance as she came from Paradise.
See how they love her, gathered near!

“Oh, Jim—it’s a full cape,”

trilled Ginny Levitan. The house was a daisy chain of architectural whimsy, a ramble of weathered ells, wings and add-ons in the style of whatever moment. Their house-to-be cuddled coyly behind a tangle of alders and runaway roses.

The house was not unoccupied. Ten-by-ten-inch white spruce sills had been shaved thin from the inside out, resonant as a fiddle back for over a century. Raddled with passageways, the sills still supported the house. Beneath the floors, past wide boards of ancient pumpkin pine pumiced, oiled and varnished by successive generations of householders disappeared, dead or run away, lay the galleries of the Long Walkers.

“It’s leaning,” said her husband. “And I don’t think it’s quite a cape—too many floors and chimneys.” Theirs was a marriage defined by silent protocols, forgotten but honored. No fights. Not today. Not yet, at least, but it was still early. “Anyway it’s most likely got issues—rotted sills, bats, beetles. Something, carpenter ants. The carpenter ants own New England,” said Jim. “Bob Vila said that once on This Old House. If we’ve got ‘em, we’ll never get rid of them. Or maybe Norm Abram said it.”