“We should let the concrete cure a few days, but I’m thinking we can get the first-floor walls framed and ready to go up while we wait. Start cutting the pieces for the floor, too.”

“I’d like to get the garden laid out,” Helen said. “Then we can get some plant starts at the farmers’ market on Saturday.”

“Yeah, sure. Absolutely,” Nate said. Their plan was to just do a small kitchen garden this year: some greens, tomatoes, cukes, a few herbs. Next year, when they weren’t busy with building, they’d expand to a proper garden, put in berry bushes, a few fruit trees. They’d laid it all out on paper: their grand plan with year-by-year goals.

“And I really want to get into town and do a little research. See what I can find out about the history of our new land.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

Nate cleared the dirty plates, pizza box, and empty wine bottle off the table, pulled out the house plans they’d carefully designed, and laid them out.

It was strange to see them here now, to realize that they’d actually begun to take shape—this house they’d planned, constructed on paper and in their heads and conversations.

The saltbox was a simple design. Helen loved the name saltbox and the history of the design. It had been popular in colonial New England and named for the lidded box people had kept salt in. Classic lines, a chimney at the center, the rear of the house a single story, the front a full two stories.

Helen thought back to the actual saltbox they’d looked at in New Hampshire at the beginning of their search; that house had sparked something deep inside her, had made her feel instantly at home. It was right in the village, down the street from a charming town green and a Congregational church. She found herself playing the what-if game—What if they were there instead of here? What if she’d found a way to convince Nate to buy that house, to not move to this land on the bog in the middle of nowhere?

Helen squinted down at the plans Nate had worked so hard on for months: the open kitchen and living room, a large pantry beside the kitchen, a woodstove in the center of the house, a half bath downstairs that shared a wall with the mechanical room, where the furnace and water heater would live, along with an eco-friendly low-energy washer and dryer. Upstairs would be the bedroom, the bathroom, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Later, as time and finances allowed, they’d add a screened-in back porch. “I took everything you loved about that New Hampshire saltbox and just made it even better,” Nate had told her with a proud smile when he brought her his first sketched design.