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bucks and a phone call.
    Twenty minutes later, a paper bag arrived, containing two plastic containers of broth, piping hot and fragrant with spice and meatiness, accompanied by all the fixings. We squeezed in some lime juice and added cooked rice noodles, then thin slices of beef, which cooked instantly, then thin-sliced raw onions and other additions. We fell on it with chopsticks and spoons, too impatient to wait for it to cool. The broth was rich and beefy and very clear, full of the delicate flavors of roasted exotic spices. The basil, cilantro, and bean sprouts werefresh and crunchy. This was real pho, excellent pho, the pho of my dreams.
    We ate it all, slurping the satiny noodles, splashing Saigon’s house-made hot chili sauce on the thin, tender slices of beef. Brendan had a cold, and I felt like I was getting one. After we ate, we both felt cured, nourished, and so much better about this town and our future life here. The house suddenly felt warmer.
    We slept well that night on our mattress in the living room, and the next day, energized and cheered, we dove straight into the long, slow process of restoring our half of the house.
    We had already half-jokingly nicknamed it the “Yankee Palazzo,” because, despite its shabbiness, the high ceilings with their original plaster medallions made us feel like New England lords and ladies. But the truth was, our house had a checkered history. It had been a Goodwill house for adults with Down syndrome as well as a school. In the past ten years alone, it had gone through several owners, and more than one of them was apparently (according to our next-door neighbor) completely batshit. Its colorful history was manifest in all the terrible things that had been done to it: ugly, cheap, disfiguring fixtures and hideous wall-to-wall carpets, institutional paint, and worst of all, a cold, dark kitchen.
    My ex-husband and I had renovated our Brooklyn house mostly by ourselves; having done that once, I felt no need to do it again, and Brendan didn’t try to talk me into it. And so, during that first winter, we stayed in the farmhouse much of the time while our house was being restored, as much as possible and as much as we could afford, to its former loveliness.
    Once a week, we drove into Portland to meet with our contractors, Patrick, Jeff, and their Landmark Construction crew. We’d find them painting the new built-in bookshelves in the upstairs study or framing out the new shower in the little bathroom, and spend an hour goingover the work still to be done: insulating the basement, painting the stairwell and foyer and rooms, putting a tile inlay into the foyer floor where the old cold-air exchange was, installing in our bedroom the vintage claw-foot bathtub that we found in the basement, a longtime dream of mine. Dingo sat at my feet and yipped at me every so often, demanding to be told what we were doing in this strange place.
    Then I went over for a class at the nearby Springboard Pilates studio, which in those days was in the high-ceilinged, bay-windowed parlor-floor rooms of a lovely, solid nineteenth-century house. The mats and machines sat on old wood floors next to carved fireplaces with ceramic hearths. My Pilates instructor, Meredith, was impressively strong, curvy, and beautiful, and had the same dark, punchy sense of humor that our contractors had; clearly, it was a Maine thing. She was constantly reminding me to breathe into my ribs, button my buttons, stay long and focused. I tried, but then she picked a piece of lint off my sock or cracked a joke about slutty hips or demonstrated a move I couldn’t quite do, fluidly and gracefully, but with comments so funny I couldn’t follow her because I was laughing too hard. I was sure laughter somehow strengthened the core, and it was a trick of hers to get me in better shape. Pilates is extremely difficult and complicated, especially if you do it right, which I couldn’t do yet, not even close, but