For those of you following our project, you might be looking for a time lapse video of the house move, which was scheduled to happen this week, October 9 -13. It did not happen Monday, which was a holiday, or Tuesday, the day we were told the “wheels” needed to move the house might arrive at the construction site, or Wednesday, when we the crew was expecting the specialized equipment. Surely they would be there Thursday, we thought, but that morning we learned the truck transporting the wheels had broken down and its replacement had to be registered before it could be taken on the road. Now we are looking at next week, October 16-20, perhaps Monday/Tuesday for the Big Move.

Practicing patience, Nils and I busied ourselves with a project at home. 

On the farm, we planted garlic and winter wheat and put the vegetable garden to bed, then turned our attention the perimeter of our fields, removing invasive bittersweet and saplings to reveal hidden stone walls. 

Tucked into the rolling hills between Lovell, Bridgton and Waterford, Sweden is only a short distance from anywhere, but feels like another world. A quiet town, Sweden is known for its country roads, stone walls and scenic vistas. 

~ Chalmers Realty, Maine Lakes Region Real Estate

What we uncovered were two kinds of walls, single stacked and double stacked. A single stacked stone wall is indicative of farming having taken place, a step beyond the rudimentary tumble walls built by pioneers in the late 18th century.  Farmers cleared their fields of stones and piled them up, their walls becoming a defining element of the landscape and the shift from lumbering to an agricultural economy.

There may have once been 250,000 miles of stone walls in America’s Northeast, stretching farther than the distance to the moon. They took 3 billion man-hours to build. And even though most are crumbling today, they contain a magnificent scientific and cultural story – about the geothermal forces that formed their stones, the tectonic movements that brought the to the surface, the glacial tide that broke them apart, the earth that held them for so long, and about the humans who built them.

~ from Stone by Stone by Robert Thorson 

The double stacked walls were built more recently, by Nils’ parents, Carol and Roger Johnson, long after the soil had been exhausted and farmers abandoned their rocky land for more fertile areas in the mid-West. City dwellers who bought old farms in the 1960s and 70s took on restoring and building stone walls as a pleasant and creative outdoor activity. 

We are carrying on that tradition. On the edge of the woodlands, the first step is to remove the bittersweet that has sprouted from the between the stones and entwined tree branches, in places, spiraling up into the canopy. I have been on the warpath fighting against the bittersweet for two seasons, ripping it down, cutting it back to its roots. Nils has helped me pick up the piles of debris and we’ve burned it in satisfying bonfires. 

Using hand loppers and an electric chainsaw, Nils has taken on the challenge of exposing  the stone walls that will be within view of our new home. It’s hard physical labor but the results can be seen immediately.  

And in the process, we found plenty to celebrate Friday night.