I started a chimney fire Sunday evening. I filled the cookstove up with dry oak, left the draft and damper open to let it catch, then walked away to do some other chores and forgot about it. A woman passing by knocked at the door to tell us that flames were coming out the smaller chimney, and it was then that I heard the smoke alarm upstairs in our bedroom. I thanked her and dashed outside to look at the chimney, which had become a Roman candle. I wanted to keep an eye on it and let it burn out, but Lynn always insists on calling the fire dept. At 17 she watched her grandmother's cottage in Bayside burn to the ground, while standing in the road in her nightie, before the Northport volunteers showed up. All her stuff was in that cottage.

I view chimney fires as an embarrassment: an indicator that I've been negligent and let too much creosote build up in my chimneys, but they're Class A chimneys, with tile flues, and should withstand chimney fires. In the 21 years we've lived in this old house, and hundreds of cords of wood we've burned, this is the third time we've called the fire dept. for a chimney fire. Left to my own devices I'd have handled them all myself and never have called the firemen at all. Lynn views this as mere macho obstinancy, and perhaps she's right.

So the Belfast volunteers showed up, with a ladder truck and innumerable pickups with lights flashing. Two of the younger guys suited up and climbed a big ladder to check the flue, but they had no chains to clean it with, so I lent them mine. The chief was irritated at this; there should be a cleaning chain on every truck, he said. They rattled it around inside the flue and got a big bucket of steaming creosote out of it.

Ever the opportunist, Mo brought his Frisbee for the firemen to throw. Lynn had just made cookies, and she distrubuted them to the guys on the ground who were watching the guys on the roof, and we turned it into a pleasant little lawn party, while I reminisced with the older guys about our previous chimney fires. Lynn was glad she'd picked up the dogshit in the yard earlier that day or all the firemen would have stepped in it and tracked it into the house.

Satisfied that the fire was out and the flue was safe, the guys on the roof climbed down and stashed the ladder on the truck. The chief checked the flue with his mirror through the clean-out door in the cellar, to make sure there was nothing still burning. I thanked them all and they rolled away, back to their families on a Sunday evening.

Brother Dave and I went down to Quiintana Roo a couple of weeks ago, just the two of us. I just
got back yesterday. We flew into Cancun, rented a Jeep and drove to the end of the
road to Xcalak, 400 km south near the border with Belize. It ain't the end
of the world, but you can definitely hear it from there. The surf on
the reef roars nonstop like a big waterfall about half a mile out, the sort
of white noise that makes sleep easy for me.

We went there to dive on the famous Chinchorro Bank, but it was blowing too
hard and the seas were too large the whole time we were there for the dive boats
to go out, so we just snorkeled about on the reefs closer to shore.
It was beautiful. Dave wants to buy some oceanfront land, build a house and retire
there, but his wife gets bored there, and much as he loves Quintana Roo and
Mayan culture, he loves his wife more. I love it there too and so does my
wife, but do I want to OWN a place there... ? I don't feel any more alien
there than I do in Maine, and my Spanish is getting better all the time. I
like Spanish. It feels good rolling off the tongue. Lynn's going down to Puerto
Morelos in March for a yoga retreat and maybe that will start us selling each other on retiring in QR. I don't think we'd lack friends to visit us, particularly in the winter. I still want to summer in Maine for the foreseeable future.

The hurricane thrashed Cancun and Cozumel and that whole coast south past Playa
del Carmen. It got stalled there for three days and hammered everything. In Puerto Morelos one of my favorite beaches near the port has a big ferryboat thrown on it. It's hard to imagine how they'll get it back in the water. All the leaves blew off the vast acres of mangroves that surround the town, and they look almost dead, but they're leafing
out again. Mangroves evolved with hurricanes and they're hard to kill. There's a good metaphor for adversity: better to lose your leaves than your roots.

Thousands of people are working to rebuild that coast, and
Cancunization is spreading south past Playa towards Tulum, huge resort
developments going up, and they're extending the 4-lane highway past Playa
too, down to Puerto Aventuras and further south south. Now there are three golf courses (!)
around Playa, a uniquely American assault on the environment. The cruise ships can't stop in Cozumel for awhile
because their docks were erased by the storm, so three a day are stopping in sleepy ol'
Mahahual, and a fleet of new tour buses take the tourists either to a nearby
ruin or to a nice beach. I guess the idea is to make the whole place look
like Orlando, but with Mexican color. It's like that old Eagles song: call
someplace paradise and kiss it goodbye.

For all that, it's still a lovely part of the world, and you can still find isolated beaches and healthy coral to marvel at. It's just that now you have to drive further, and now it helps to have 4WD. The shore roads took a beating, and the more remote ones are low on the repair list, assuming that such a list exists. A bridge is out too. We had a Jeep and most of the coast road was still rough going in second gear.

The Mayans are still there, still quiet and solid and smiling, watching us bizarre pale aliens with a bemused tolerance. Maybe someday we'll all go away and leave them alone in their Eden again.

For a great airplane tour of that whole coast from Xcalak to Cancun, check out www.locogringo.com/maps/tour/P1010054a-t.html .

I knew a couple in Wiscasset, parents of a college chum. The mother, Annzie, was a rich girl from CT who'd grown up with servants all her life. She married Bill right out of Bryn Mawr, and the newlyweds sailed off on Bill's boat for a honeymoon on the Maine Coast. For their first wedded meal Annzie decided she'd cook Bill a pair of lobsters. She'd never cooked a meal in her life, but how hard could that be? You just boil them until they're done. She searched the galley for a proper pot, but couldn't find one, and so she settled on a coffee percolator, stuffed the two lobsters in tails first, and put them on to boil.

After they'd had a few cocktails on deck, Annzie checked on the lobsters and decided they were done. She proudly served Bill his lobster. Imagine his surprise when the poor creature crawled off the plate, dragging its cooked red tail behind it!

Bill never tired of telling this story, even when he and Annzie were quite advanced in years. The problem was, he said, that Annzie's cooking never improved. He wasn't kidding. I once saw her cut a tube of cookie dough into slices for canapes and serve them to her guests.

No, cooking wasn't Annzie's strong suit, but she was a brilliant conversationalist, a talent which is equally important. She and Bill are both gone now, and I miss them.

We have two cats but no catbox. We allow our cats full-time access to the outdoors via a cat-door from the kitchen to the cellar and another through the cellar wall to the storage area under the porch. We've never had so much as a turd in the house, and their shit-spot remains a mystery like the elephants' graveyard. It's out there somewhere on our 400 acres.

The down-side is that they bring all sorts of wildlife into the kitchen in various states of dismemberment. Sometimes their catch is alive and fully mobile, like the red squirrel that got away from them and hid in our Christmas tree, or the brown bat that flew into my wife's hair, or the woodcock that flew into my face. Once they brought a full-grown muskrat, minus the head, up the cellar steps but couldn't quite fit it through the upper cat-door. Stepping on that was quite startling, to say the least. Then there are the birds... .

Their kills have provided lessons in natural history for me and the boys, since many of them are in fresh and perfect condition, just dead. Have you ever stretched the rubbery membrane of a bat's wing, extended the soaring membrane of a flying squirrel or stroked the velvet fur of a star-nosed mole? Or held a pygmy shrew, smallest of the mammals?

Other animal-lovers tell us that we should keep our cats confined to avoid this carnage, but then we'd have a cat-box to empty, so this is an ongoing moral dilemma. We have cats to keep the rodents down, otherwise we'd be overrun. There's been a family of rats on this old farm since 1871, but the cats keep their numbers manageable. It would be fine if they'd confine their murderous mayhem to rats and mice, but they'll kill anything smaller than they are, and I hate it when they kill birds. Last summer I was admiring a male bobolink on the telephone wire, and twenty minutes later I found it dead on the ground by the barn.

I know all about Nature red in tooth and claw, but this portion of it is within my power, and I know that spoiled American house-cats kill billions of birds and other creatures a year, some of them threatened or endangered, that in fact cats are a major predator. What's worse, that predation is largely an instinctive game to them; they're well-fed and don't need to hunt in order to survive. They kill because that's what their genes tell them to do. So there we have the horns of that particular dilemma. Some days I feel like strangling our cats, particularly when I find a bird dismembered all over the kitchen, downy feathers drifting out from under my feet, but I keep feeding them.

Old women in Maine have an expression I've never heard anywhere else. They call the third son "your ticket to heaven." I've heard this from several of them in different parts of the state: "You have three sons? That third son is your ticket to heaven."

Two possible explanations for this expression come to mind. The first is acceleration, that the stresses of three sons will kill you sooner, and so get you to heaven earlier. I've noticed the increase in stresses as my sons came along, one after the other, every thirty months just like clockwork, and I've come up with a mathematical formula which I call the Squire's Law: the hassles with kids vary as the square of the number of kids. It's definitely not an arithmetic increase. Two are a lot more than one, and three are a WHOLE lot more than two. And four? Well, I'd rather not think about that.

And I won't be having four anyway, since I had my vases disconnected before my third son was born. I believe in zero population growth, and felt pretty sheepish about number three, as though people would think I didn't know what was causing it, or perhaps that I was a devout old-fashioned Catholic. Or I just couldn't keep it in my pants. That's closer to the truth. On one of Groucho's "You Bet Your Life" shows back in the Fifties, a contestant told Groucho that he had eight kids. "You have EIGHT kids!" Groucho exclaimed. "Well, Groucho, I love my wife," the contestant tried to explain. Groucho replied "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally!"

A few years ago we took the boys down to Key West for their February holiday. We had a great time in that colorful little town. Every morning I'd get my wife's coffee at a shop operated by a cute little Cuban lady with a mouthful of shiny gold teeth. One morning I was kvetching about the kids, as I do too often, and she told me she had eight children. "Eight kids!" I exclaimed, "my God, what were you thinking?" "Theenkin'?" she chuckled. "I vas no THEENKIN'. Vas you theenkin'?" No, I guess I wasn't.

Another explanation for the ticket to heaven is a more Calvinist, and therefore more likely Maine, approach. And that is that by the time you've raised three sons you've earned your right to eternal bliss. Heaven, according to Calvin, is something we earn with hard work and suffering down here on Earth, and no Americans work harder or suffer more than Mainers, with our sparse economy, our rocky soil, our brutally cold, long winters, our black flies and mosquitoes, the polluted air that the prevailing westerlies blow in from New Jersey, New York and Boston, and our short but glorious summers teeming with tourists.

Don't get me wrong, I love my boys. They're great kids: smart, funny, talented, generous, loyal, fair-minded, well-formed and surprisingly handsome given my genetic contribution. They must take after their mom's side of the family. I married late in life; I was the classic case of the old bachelor who gets his head spun around by the younger woman. When we hooked up I was almost 40 and she was 24. That's almost a generation gap. She barely remembers the Sixties, and that's when I came of age. When you're 40 and have never been married, people think that you're either pathologically incapable of commitment, or you're gay. I admit that I did have some issues around commitment, and I'd always been attracted to bohemian women who weren't interested in marriage, but that begs the question: why was I attracted to them? It wasn't just tits and ass. Or was it?

I was looking to start a family. She was not. I really thought that I'd be missing out on something if I didn't have children, and when I first laid eyes on my wife I was unconsciously assessing her breeding potential. "Wow!" I thought. "I'd like to father HER children." We were married the old-fashioned way, as they say: when she was three months pregnant.

There's something to be said for having kids later, particularly for men. I don't think men are mature enough to have kids until we're at least 30. But I was almost 43 when our first boy was born, and I was already starting to tire easier, already starting to feel the effects of age, and boy, those sleepless nights with sick kids were hard. What could be worse than a screaming baby with a ear infection? By the time my youngest boy was born I was 48, at an age when most men are having grandchildren. I've always regretted that I balked when my wife wanted to adopt one of those little Chinese girls. I argued that our resources: attention, energy, money, were already spread pretty thin. But we'd have had a daughter, and my boys would have had a sister, and my wife would have had a companion amidst the fog of testosterone that clouds this old house.

I don't believe in heaven in the old-fashioned Christian sense. I see bad things happening to good people, and a lot of good things happening to bad people, and I think it's all pretty random. If there is a God, His eye ain't on the sparrow. I see God as the force of Nature, what Dylan Thomas called " the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." The notion of a judgemental bearded patriarch sitting above us is pretty silly, to me, and pretty damaging to life. Life is what's sacred, and whatever threatens that is unholy: wars, killing, pollution. I believe there is some sort of life after death; something happens to this consciousness after the body quits. I can feel my heart swell when I look at my boys in their peaceful moments, when they're not squabbling. My boys have raised my consciousness, made my soul larger at the same time that they've worn my body down. Maybe that's the ticket.