The rest of it happened in a blur. One day, Nate brought her a book on home canning. That weekend, he woke her up early on Saturday morning with a kiss and a smile. He handed her a cup of coffee. “We’re going apple picking,” he said. And Helen had loved being out at the orchard, breathing in the crisp autumn air. She’d come home feeling rejuvenated and, following the instructions in her new book, made six jars of applesauce and six of apple jelly. The next few weeks, Nate dove headlong into internet searches on “finding a home in the country” and spent hours on New England real estate sites.

    They looked at properties in Connecticut and Massachusetts but ultimately narrowed their search to Vermont and New Hampshire. None of the houses they looked at was quite right. Helen loved the old colonials and farmhouses, but houses that were one-hundred-plus years old needed a great deal of work: they saw crumbling foundations, dirt-floored basements, old knob-and-tube wiring, leaking pipes, rotting beams, sagging roofs. Helen was enamored with the idea of finding an old house, a house with history, and bringing it back to life. Her favorite house was one of the first they’d seen: an old saltbox in a tiny village outside of Keene, New Hampshire. There were hand-hewn exposed beams in almost every room and wide-plank pine floors. She stood at the deep soapstone kitchen sink and looked out at the front yard, feeling at home immediately. But Nate—now armed with weeks of research—pointed out the dry rot, the ancient wiring that was a house fire waiting to happen, the damage to the old slate roof.

“We could save it,” she said hopefully.

He shook his head. She could tell he was doing all the mental calculations. “I don’t think there’s enough money for that. This poor house needs to be taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up.” He looked around helplessly. “We should just build our own place,” he muttered.

Though it was Nate who came up with the idea, it took several more weekends of viewing a dozen more broken-down houses (a few of which delighted Helen, but he’d pronounced not worth saving) before the idea took root.

They were having dinner in a motel room—pizza, ordered in—after another long day of driving around the back roads of Vermont. “Maybe we should consider it,” Nate said. “A new home, built from the ground up. That way we can get exactly what we want.”

“But a new house just seems so cold, so sterile,” Helen argued. She thought of her Little House on the Prairie books. She thought of her father, of the countless old houses he’d worked on—of the way he’d study a house and make a comment about its good bones or its character. He spoke of old houses like they were people.

    “It doesn’t have to be,” Nate said. “It can be whatever we make it.”

“But there’s no sense of history,” Helen said.

“We can base it on an old colonial design if that’s what you want,” Nate said. “Think about it—we get the best of both worlds! We can take something classic and make it our own. Energy efficient, eco-friendly, passive solar, whatever we want.”

Helen smiled. “Have you been down a Google rabbit hole again?”

He laughed. Clearly the answer was yes. But Nate’s question was still in the air and he looked at her, waiting for a response.

“I don’t know,” Helen admitted. “That’s so much more money.”

“Not necessarily,” he countered. “Not once you factor in the true cost of renovating an old place like the ones we’ve been looking at. In fact, we might even end up saving money, especially when you look at it long term if we build it to be superefficient.”

The more Nate talked, the more excited he got, the idea snowballing as he went along. They would do the work themselves—they were already discussing theoretical renovations to so many of the homes they’d viewed. Why not take it a few steps further? “Oh my god, why didn’t we think of this before? We haven’t found anything even close to our dream house because it doesn’t exist yet—we have to build it! We’ll be like Thoreau on Walden Pond!”

She shook her head, gave a don’t be ridiculous laugh. She’d studied Thoreau in college, even took a field trip out to Walden Pond. “Thoreau built a tiny cabin big enough for a desk and a bed. We’re talking about a two-thousand-square-foot house with all the modern conveniences. Do you have any idea how much work that is?”

“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Nate said. And then he threw the gauntlet down: “But don’t you think this is what your father would want?”

“I don’t—” She faltered. She remembered helping her father with the finish work on a house he’d built the summer before she went away to college. “This house,” her dad had said, “it’s gonna be here a long, long time. You can drive by with your kids, your grandkids, and tell them you helped build it. This house, this thing we built, it’ll outlive us both.”

“I think it’s perfect!” Nate said. “Trust me! It’s going to be perfect.”

It was hard, really, not to get swept up in Nate’s enthusiasm. Not to believe him when he had a solution to a problem. He was the rational one, the critical thinker, and she’d come to trust him on all practical matters. He’d known (after hours of research) which car they should buy, the best plan for paying off the last of their student loans, even which gym they should join.