“Unbelievable,” Oliver stood in the middle of the room with Alex, “We managed to finish one whole project. You ready to start the next now?”

“I’m ready to start drinking whiskey,” Alexander replied. “But the room is nice.”

“I think we’ve learned enough to get the next up more quickly.”

“Oh, you think that, do you?”

“Oh aye!” Oliver turned to his brother, “At least I learned enough from my mistakes if you didn’t! I used the phone and asked for help! Dad and our cousins, Mike, Dennis and Artie, and Uncle Ian and Great Uncle Jack are going to come help us on the weekends!”

“You are the clever one, Oliver!” He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“Tell me about it!” Ollie sounded very satisfied as he returned the gesture.

“Well,” Alex said quickly after a moment of silence, “Let's go get pissed then.”

“OK.”

With the extra help from Oliver’s family and Lance, who came down to visit whenever he could, we had two bedrooms and a kitchen with a larger wood burning stove to cook on by the time the second snow fell. We called Professor Walker’s son in once again to set us up with plumbing in our kitchen. It worked very well each year until December when the pipes would freeze and we were back to boiling pots of water on the stoves. We redid all the floors with new oak and had new windows cut and installed. The house was still small, but really quite lovely.

Alexander was so fascinated with the process of adding on to the cabin that he changed his direction at university from engineering to architecture. Devising and building structures had become his passion and he was talented with it. By request, he designed and built a tree house for the mayor’s children. It sat proudly in a great oak in the man’s front garden and demanded attention from passers-by, particularly because of its Northern tower and the spiral steps leading up to it that wrapped around the tree. It wasn’t long before Alexander was sought out to make more. He earned loads of money on the side customizing tree houses and play houses for people’s children. He loved it, too. I never saw Alex as happy or satisfied as when he was sitting with his drawing pencils in front of graph paper or when he was standing near a pile of timber and steel.

It was such a busy point in time, those four years. Oliver and I had full time jobs, both of us, as well as being full time students at Cardiff. Oliver still worked as he always had at the mill loading bags of flour into the back of trucks, only now he was a manager and was making better money. I had gotten a position just off the university campus at a cafe as a server until I finished my Biology degree. I then went off to work part time at a hospital, spinning blood in test tubes and scraping cack on to slides in search of parasites. It was better pay, but it was boring. Oliver and I tried to set our schedules as close to each other as we could, but it was more or less impossible. We didn’t see much of each other and life was becoming less and less fun.

Still, we were so happy when we were together. We must have been completely mental. It’s hysterical. There we were living in the middle of nowhere, still in a minuscule little house. We had no electricity at all and no running water in the winter, plus it took half the spring for our pipes to regain water pressure and they never did decide whether to give us hot or cold and water when it rained hard enough. I did have a fantastic garden, though. I found I had a knack for keeping it, and we’d managed to afford two decent cars, using part of Oliver’s trust, that could make it up the path to the cabin even in the worst weather. And we had each other, best of all.

Oliver and I would still go into town and use our mobile phones to keep in touch with people since we couldn’t get a signal at the house. We were too far out to have telephone lines, so a home phone was out of the question. I rang Sandra as often as I could to see how she was doing and Lucy, too, on the days she could receive calls at Bennington. Lucy was sixteen now. She’d matured into a young lady with her own notions. Headstrong and independent, she had gotten over her anxiety about being at school without all of us and had fallen into a groove of her own. Lucy, from what I had gathered, had taken over the campus and was back to doing anything she could to avoid actually learning anything. Bless her heart, she couldn’t seem to be serious about anything but worrying about Alexander.

“How is he?” She’d ask, “I only talked to him a minute about a week ago. He sounded a bit boggled. Have him ring me, right? I miss you all so much. I know you‘re busy, but you should get Xander and come and visit.”

“You can come here, you know.”

“I know. It’s just that I’m all tied up most of the time, especially on the weekends. Will you tell Xander to ring me, please?”

I’d tell him, but I never knew if he did.

Oliver kept up with Lance and Merlyn. We even occasionally gave Headmistress Pennyweather a ring. Everyone was fine and busy like we were. Life was moving at warp speed. I think it does for everyone when they get into their early twenties. There’s just too much going on to give anything the attention it deserves. Wasted years, those are, all action and very little meaning. At least they were to us. We thought we were living, but I think now that we were only sleep walking. We were like robots programmed to achieve goals. We focused, we toiled, we got the job done, did what was expected of us, and we took no pleasure in any of it. While we were busy succeeding at every challenge we undertook, there was not as much music, there was not as many jokes, and we didn’t laugh as much as we once had. I’d say that at twenty-one, Oliver and I were the most grown up we’d ever be in our entire lives. Thank God we eventually got over it.

When we forgot or got too busy to ring, Oliver’s mother would come looking if she hadn’t heard from us by the weekend. “Anything could happen to you out here in a place like this!” She’d tell us, “I wish you’d go get a nice flat in Cardiff!”

“We can’t afford rent in Cardiff, “Oliver would say.

“If you’d just let your dad and me help you…“

“Forget about it, Mum. We’ll do this on our own. “

As difficult as it was to live there sometimes because of its remoteness, Oliver and I had no intention of ever leaving that little cabin. I don’t think it ever would have crossed our minds if it wasn’t being constantly mentioned by her. What no one but Alexander understood was that life at the cabin was interesting. It was not long after we had moved in that I began to truly understand why Oliver swore the place was magical. There were more than a few nights we’d look over and see and a small tan and white owl perched in our kitchen window, peering at us with its huge yellow eyes as if it wanted to know us better. Oliver called him Alfie. “Hello, Alfie,” He’d say as he walked past with a bowl of something, “How are you tonight? Come in if you like.” Alfie would just watch him with his huge eyes and not make a move in either direction. “Suit yourself, Mate,” Ollie would tell him, “You know you’re always welcome.”

It wasn’t just Alfie, either, who visited. None of the animals seemed shy in the wood. Hares would hop about unbothered by the goings on of people in the lawn. Foxes would sit at the edge of the garden and clean each other’s coats. Miniature deer would come up from the wood and climb on to our front porch and linger. They’d peek inside the windows, leaving nose prints and smears on the glass. The grass along the path would dry and dull, but it was always green on the lawn. Flowers would grow in patches where there was no grass. It gave a person the sense that they were in a place that defied standard. That you were somehow straddling the divide between what was convention and all that was possible. In the wood, the lines of reality were always blurred.